Masterpiece of Reality
by Lauralot
Summary: No idea is simple when you need to plant it in a madman's mind.  Crossover with The Dark Knight.  Takes place after both Inception and TDK, and in an alternate continuity from TDKR.
1. Playing Games

AN: To my readers of _The Sword of Damocles, _no, the appearance of this fic does not mean I've abandoned that one. But due to my schedule for this semester and an as-of-yet undiagnosed health problem, that story has been so delayed that now, even sitting down to type it just brings on a wave of needless self-guilt and feelings of incompetence, and the story is just so tied emotionally to the roughness of this semester that I don't enjoy trying to write it right now. And if I'm forcing myself to write it, I doubt it'll be fun for anyone to read. So I decided to write something drastically different, new, and exciting, and this is what I came up with.

This story takes place about two years after the events of _The Dark Knight _and _Inception _occurred.

The title comes from the quote "dreams are like the paints of a great artist. The dreams are your paints, the world is your canvas. Believing, is the brush that converts your dreams into a masterpiece of reality." Try as I might, I've yet to find an attribution for that line.

Reviews are always appreciated!

* * *

Arthur hadn't slept.

An outsider wouldn't have realized it. There was no slump to the man's shoulders, nothing more than the faintest of dark circles below his eyes. He was alert as ever, eyes wide open, focused, and Eames imagined the man had stocked up on some sort of caffeine during their flight. He couldn't confirm it one way or the other, however, because Arthur's breath, as always, smelled only of mint, and Eames hadn't been able to observe what his companion had consumed on the way to Japan because, being a reasonable person, Eames had fallen asleep. Even now, seated in the back of a taxi and stuck in traffic with no one speaking and absolutely nothing to do, Arthur showed no signs of fatigue.

Sometimes Eames wondered the point man was a man at all, or some sort of android prototype. He'd seen Arthur bleed in dreams, but that was hardly proof of anything.

"You know, we really ought to look around the city before we get to business," he began, staring at the shop signs outside. The rain had fogged the windows, making the neon lights blurred and illegible, though Eames couldn't have read it anyway. He knew just enough Japanese to get by verbally, but when it came to any of the syllabaries, he was illiterate. Reading wasn't necessary in a dream, in which words on the page were really just the mark's thoughts and feelings, after all, and he'd always been able to get by without it in the waking world.

"Absolutely not."

Eames knew Arthur hadn't slept not because of any external clue, but from years of experience. Arthur was angry, and when he was angry, everything else fell by the wayside. Eating, drinking, sleeping—they all became detriments to the strength of his conviction and relegated to the absolute minimum. Eames would be willing to bet that whatever Arthur had consumed during the flight had simply been something to keep him awake, not to provide any lasting nourishment.

Arthur's anger wasn't explosive, not like Cobb or so many other men Eames had worked with. They were akin to a pot boiling over, whereas his current companion bore more resemblance to a pot of water that, although set on simmer, would still slowly build to a boil through its sheer duration and conviction. There was no room for anything else when Arthur was angry. Not food, not rest, and certainly not sightseeing.

"Darling, how often do you find yourself in Tokyo? On a free flight, no less?"

Arthur didn't deem that worthy of an answer, apparently, as he went back to the all-important task of brooding out the window.

Arthur had called Saito yesterday afternoon, asking—well, demanding—for Saito to provide them with transportation to the man's current location, the penthouse in Tokyo. They needed to talk, he had said tersely. When Arthur was in a mood, there was no such thing as an argument over the phone. No, he needed to be face to face in order to glare and furrow his brow and throw his version of a tantrum properly.

"It seems a waste of a trip, if you ask me," Eames muttered, pretending not to see the death glare Arthur sent his way.

* * *

Maths had never Eames's strong point—between that and spelling, his marks in primary school had been just a hair short of abysmal—but it seemed to him, mentally adding up the number of floors in the apartment complex and multiplying that by the estimated height of each level, that if Saito's penthouse were any higher, it would be in orbit. Certainly the elevator ride up to it felt unnaturally long, but that might have been due to sharing the space with Arthur, who by this point seemed to be giving off anger in palpable waves.

"You know, Arthur, I doubt there's anything he can do about it now."

The elevator doors slid open, and Arthur was out without a glance back. "That's not the point."

The point seemed to be that, even though there was no use crying over spilled milk as much as a moment after the fact, it was still perfectly acceptable to travel halfway across the globe in order to pitch a fit about things a day afterward, if only for catharsis. Not that Arthur would ever put it in such common terms. No, he'd go on about a need for discretion and reckless namedropping and everything else he'd ranted about yesterday before he'd decided that the silent treatment was a better way of letting himself develop ulcers.

There was no bell. Eames supposed they should have been buzzed in at the ground level, back when they were still in Earth's atmosphere, but Saito had known they were coming, and Saito, judging by his resources, was either God Himself or had bought the planet from Him, so they'd been ushered in by the concierge without so much as a request for their names. Arthur knocked against the door, one, twice, three times, with enough force to redden his knuckles when he pulled his hand away. There was a pause, and the door opened.

Robert Fischer stood inside.

As a forger, Eames had been trained to have both precise control of his emotions and expressions and to have the ability to dissect the mannerisms of others in a manner of seconds. His own face impassive, he watched Fischer's eyes pass over them twice, each gaze lingering for just a fraction too long, pupils dilating—he ought to recognize them, but from _where_?—and hovering on Eames the longest. Eames was, after all, the one he'd gotten the closest look at in the taxi on the first level.

But the gaze lasted a matter of seconds, if that—two years was a long time to remember the faces in a dream—and then he was back to looking indifferent, if polite. "May I help you?"

Arthur was not quite gaping, but his usual precision and control seemed to have left him, perhaps dulled by fatigue, and the widening of his eyes and slight gape of his mouth wouldn't be ignored for much longer if he kept it up without answering.

Eames, as per usual, took it upon himself to save the day. "Thank God, another English speaker," he muttered, and while Robert Fischer did not quite smile, the subtle shift to his expression made it clear that he'd had more than a few struggles with the language barrier. "Yes, we've an appointment with Mr. Saito? He sent for us yesterday, I believe he knows we've arrived."

"Ah. He mentioned having company." Fischer stepped to the side, ushering them in. "Leave your shoes by the door. I'll find him for you." He left them there, Arthur still gawking, and disappeared further into the penthouse. "Saito-sempai?"

"You cannot be serious," Arthur said, once the man was out of ear shot.

Eames didn't bother to mention that what he found most surprising about all of this was the fact that Saito didn't have a servant positioned at all hours to open the door. "Well, they are business partners."

"I'm going to kill him."

Eames also didn't point out that Saito had probably bought himself a spare life or two somewhere along the line. This time, not out of tact, but because one of what he assumed to be Saito's maids appeared and asked them to follow.

The décor in Saito's parlor room alone had to be worth enough to buy a third world nation. Eames considered pointing this out, but Arthur, being in a mood, wouldn't appreciate it, and knowing Saito, he probably already owned a third world country. Or several. More than anything, Eames was relieved to find that the room was designed, at least in part, in Western style; spacious as the flight had been, it was hard to spend eleven hours on an airplane and then another two stuck in a taxi without getting a bit cramped. He wasn't sure how he'd have managed if they'd ended up kneeling around the table as Saito and Robert were, invested in some form of paperwork.

Saito's voice as he greeted them had that same peaceful, Zen-like quality it had held ever since the inception was completed, and Eames could tell by the faint tense in Arthur's jaw that the calm had nearly pushed him over the edge. He could likewise tell by the faint smile on Saito's face that their former employer had noticed as well, along with the way his expression was just the slightest bit too innocent when he asked, "Now, exactly what is it that you came to discuss?"

Arthur sat down like a mature adult instead of throwing himself into the chair, which Eames was sure he really wanted to do, though he must know how obvious his anger was in spite of his flawless etiquette. It really was astounding, the length of time he could sustain a grudge. If Eames weren't dead set on getting some enjoyment out of this trip, he'd be severely tempted to keep the man angry, just to see how long Arthur would keep it up. "Bruce Wayne."

Saito's smile went from polite to amused at that, and Eames was sure that Arthur would have leapt over the table and throttled the man were Fischer not sitting directly in his path. Saito had probably arranged them that way on purpose. Hell, he'd probably had Fischer open the door so that Arthur wouldn't walk in shouting. And it was Fischer that he turned to once Arthur was suitably fuming. "Robert, could you give us a moment?"

Fischer nodded, stood, and exited, saying something that sounded vaguely like "_shitsureishimasu_" if it were being pronounced through a mouthful of rocks.

"You're teaching him Japanese?" Arthur asked, in a tone that implied teaching languages was on par with genocide.

"Our corporations are merging." Saito straightened the paperwork on the table before relocating to one of the chairs. "Is it not beneficial to be able to communicate in any business venture?"

"And you need to live with him to do that?" Another maid appeared with a tray of tea, and Arthur displayed remarkable reserve by not throwing the boiling liquid into Saito's face.

"I don't recall saying we're living together."

"I don't recall your denying it, either." Eames took a cup from the maid, sipped it, winced. What sort of animal served tea without lemon or sugar? Saito and Fischer, flatmates. It sounded like the setup for some sort of corporate comedy show. He imagined Cobb would take the news about as well as Arthur, if Cobb were still with them. He'd sworn off the business after being reunited with his children, going back to the straight and narrow.

For now, anyway. It had become more than just a way home for him, in those years. It had become a lifestyle. They all knew he'd be back sooner or later. Cobb himself might even know it, deep down. The only question was when.

Saito ran a finger along the rim of his own cup, nonchalant as always. "He barely understands the most basic of phrases. If Robert Fischer were to live on his own here, he would get into a taxi to buy groceries and end up stranded in a red light district."

Well, that mental image made the trip more than worthwhile, sightseeing or not.

"And even without the language barrier, Robert's rededicated what remains of his business to green energy." He spun that same finger in a circle, mimicking the windmill on the Gawain Energies logo. "Does it not follow that he would prefer to share resources?"

"Wouldn't it also follow that he'd prefer not to be in a penthouse the size of a city block? Or to be exposed to those who altered his worldview, and risk having him remember the entire job?" Eames knew it was biologically impossible for steam to shoot out of a person's ears—in circumstances he cared to consider, anyway—but if Arthur got any more tense about things, he just might manage to break the laws of nature.

Saito, in contrast, only shrugged. "You needn't concern yourself with that. He hasn't noticed a thing over six months of negotiations. Now, I thought you had come to discuss Bruce Wayne?"

"You told him about us."

"I did." Saito had mastered the art of hiding his mirth behind a look of innocent, mild bewilderment so well that even Eames was envious. "I believe it is customary to recommend employees who have performed admirably. Particularly those whose salaries are based on commissions."

Arthur didn't quite slam his cup onto the table, but he moved it with enough force to send a few drops of tea cascading down the ceramic side. "You knew this would happen and you did it for your own entertainment."

"This?" He arched a brow. "I mentioned the quality of your services. I had no idea what Mr. Wayne intended to request, or if he would require anything at all. Wayne Enterprises has always been remarkably self-reliant. Even now, I have no idea what he asked of you."

Arthur seemed stuck between believing this—much to his frustration—or adjusting the narrow end of Saito's tie by about a meter, so Eames took it upon himself to recount the events of their meeting with the Prince of Gotham yesterday morning.

* * *

The initial request came by phone, as usual. It was rare for someone to bring the subject up in a face-to-face meeting unless the team had done work for them before, and no one at Wayne Enterprises, let alone their CEO, had ever required the services of an extractor. At least, they had never contacted the members of this particular team if they had.

The details, of course, were not discussed over the phone. Even the absolute basics of the job, or the fact that a job would be arranged at all, weren't something communicated anywhere but face to face. A phone conversation generally consisted of the following: The caller confirming that he had reached the right person, stating a name and a location, getting the extractor's location, and then deciding on the place and time of a meeting to discuss things in full detail. A phone line could be searched for tapping, true, but only meeting face to face could confirm the caller's identity, and a situation there was far easier to negotiate and much safer in terms of security. So when the call "Bruce Wayne, Gotham" had come through, a meeting point had been arranged midway between the billionaire's city and their current location in Manhattan—stealing fashion sketches from the minds of clothing designers was far less interesting than it sounded—for the next week, and Arthur and Eames had spent the next several days wondering just what the prince of Gotham needed from them.

While Wayne Enterprises' CEO was well-known for his drunken antics, the company itself was well-known in the corporate world for its lack of scandal, likely owing the fact that Bruce Wayne wasn't really the one running things. Their research into the company after the call showed no loss of revenue that would explain the need to extract from a competitor, no signs of a scandal that needed sweeping under the rug. Either they had the world's most talented bookkeeper, or the company's record really was spotless.

"Maybe," Eames had suggested when they took off for the meeting place, completely out of ideas, "he's got a jilted lover stashing compromising photos of him somewhere, and he needs their location."

But it hadn't been Bruce Wayne the playboy that they'd encountered in their chosen hotel room, the hall surveillance camera hijacked and added to their own feed, along with the cameras positioned out the window and more placed in front of all entrances and exits. The rooms had been swept for bugs, and all worst case scenarios exits checked and double-checked to make sure they were clear. Arthur had been the one to bother with most of the security things. It wasn't that Eames didn't have experience; he just found the whole process to be bloody tedious.

The Bruce Wayne they'd met, despite his good façade of confidence and calm, was nervous. Eames supposed it this were his first foray into the illegal—barring, of course, a bit of underage drinking and a few hits of the drug of the moment here and there—then it was to be expected, but it was rare to see a business tycoon with a conscience about such things these days, particularly if that tycoon had just been on the cover of all the tabloids for deciding that a few of his fashion model friends were fine to go skinny-dipping in the fountain at a charity ball.

"I've never really arranged something like this before," he admitted, fingers curling the edges of the file he'd brought along.

"Take your time." Arthur's eyes had barely left the computer monitor, focused intently on the hall as though it could become overrun with police officers or former marks or Jehovah's Witnesses at any moment.

"I'm not sure where to start."

"You could tell us the name of your mark, to begin," Eames suggested. "And what it is that you would like us to retrieve for you."

"That's the problem. I don't need anything retrieved." Wayne twisted a hand through his hair, exhaling heavily. "I—it's hard to explain, and you're going to think I'm crazy for even asking it, I know—"

"We've had a number of strange requests in our time, Mr. Wayne," Arthur informed him. "We've probably heard yours before in one way or another."

"I doubt that." He opened the file, turned it to face them, and tapped his finger against the photo sitting on the top of the information. "That's your mark. I assume I don't need to introduce him?"

Of course he didn't. There wasn't anyone in the developed world that didn't know that face, no one who hadn't seen at least a passing glimpse of it on a news station or in the papers. Even Eames, for all his control over his mannerisms, couldn't keep his jaw from dropping slightly, and he knew without looking that beside him Arthur was doing the same.

Dark eyes surrounded by darker greasepaint glared back at them, the rest of the face white as a skull, with a red, twisted slash through the mouth. The Joker.

Well, this meeting would make an interesting story to tell over drinks, if nothing else.


	2. Radical Notion

AN: **For any readers who haven't seen Inception—I've been told I have a few from the Bat fandom—I've added some notes at the end of the chapter to explain the characters and the general way their world works. Obviously, this will contain spoilers for the film.**

Thanks for the reviews, everyone, and the well wishes! I'll let you know when I have answers about whatever going on with me; all I know so far is that it doesn't appear to be a serious issue. That, and that the tape they use to hold on heart monitors is insanely itchy and leaves a residue that won't come off for days on end. Yeah, that part was annoying, but not as much as contrast dye.

In other news, there's a few things I've been meaning to mention in my author's notes for a while: Firstly, that I got to be Harley Quinn in my town's Halloween parade—my grandfather enlisted me to ride with him, as he was running for office at the time—and seven people actually recognized me, only one of whom was an adult. The others were all super young children, too young to have probably even seen _The Batman_, which, to my knowledge, is the last show to feature Harley. So that made my day. I had one kid call me the Joker's wife and five call me the Joker, though I imagine they were thinking of the guy on the cards and not the Joker from Batman.

Also, in my first week back at college, so many months ago, I happened to walk past a guy with a tattoo reading "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me." I may or may not have squee'd, because I'm a total fan girl like that.

My next author's note will not be this long, I promise.

* * *

Arthur had pulled his mobile from his pocket less than a minute after Wayne opened the file to reveal his city's costumed terrorist, activating one of the speed dial lines without a glance at the numbers, then pressing the phone to his ear. Eames hadn't seen which number he pressed, but he knew without asking what the answer would be. Their security in the hall, so that Arthur could give the, the go-ahead to dissemble and take the cameras with them. The only thing Arthur did better than research was risk assessment—well, Arthur called it assessment, and Eames called it being a stick in the mud—and he'd be about as likely to risk a job like this as he would be to stick his face in liquid nitrogen and inhale deeply.

The answer in the other end of the line came a few seconds later. "Yes, it's me," Arthur had said, staring at his laptop. "We're finished here, and all the cameras are clear, so you shouldn't have any trouble with bystanders when you collect them—"

"Wait." Wayne had closed the file hurriedly, as if though not looking at the madman's picture would change the nature of the request. "You haven't heard what I'm proposing yet, you don't understand—"

Arthur didn't bother to look away from the laptop screen, still giving instructions over the mobile. Eames had expected as much, and gave the billionaire an apologetic smile as he pushed back his chair. "On the contrary, Mr. Wayne, I think we're quite clear on what it is you're requesting. You'd like us to enter the mind of a criminal lunatic and as gripping as that sounds, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Arthur isn't interested. And since we do work as a team, I'll have to decline as well."

Arthur had stood, closing the laptop, though Eames lingered. Suicidal and preposterous as this request was, he'd at least like to know what it was the man needed from the mind of a serial killer with questionable taste in makeup before they said their goodbyes and promptly disappeared from Bruce Wayne's life.

"Wait." Wayne, with all the agility that only a man with a personal trainer and his own private gym could possess, had the door blocked with his body before Eames had even begun to stand. "Look, I know it sounds insane."

"Yes," Arthur had said, laptop bag slung over his shoulder, the mobile back in his pocket. "It does, Mr. Wayne. Which is why we're turning down your offer. Now, if you'll excuse us—"

"Do you have any idea what this man has done to Gotham?"

Any idea? What person in the developed world hadn't any idea, apart from those who abstained from television or the Internet or any other form of technology for spiritual purposes? And even then, they'd probably seen it in the papers. A city with a man who fought crime in costume was news enough, but to have a terrorist with garish clown makeup—though, admittedly, a nice taste in suits—oppose him? That was worth a week of coverage on the twenty-hour hour news channels at least. Particularly when the clown's recreational activities included blowing up hospitals and making his own news broadcasts, and that was just his first reign of terror.

Of course his attorney had used the insanity defense. What else could possibly be argued in the clown's favor? No one had expected it to do any good, even when the man was sent to the nearest madhouse for a few months' evaluation. The insanity plea was rarely accepted, despite its portrayal in fiction. Everyone had expected him to get the chair, to the point that the hospital's regular staff couldn't even try treating him, knowing their own bias would show through. The case had gone to an intern, of all available options, the only one who hadn't been in the city during the clown's rampage. Two months later, he was out. A week later, the police concluded that the intern had orchestrated the escape, and it came out that she was the clown's new partner in crime, driven nearly as mad as he was during their sessions together.

The tabloids had loved the cross between Cirque du Soleil and Bonnie and Clyde, of course, and the pair hadn't exactly failed to provide lurid tales for them. Half a dozen deaths and several million in property damages later, and now the Clown Prince—and Princess—of Crime were back in the madhouse so that the whole process could start again.

All in all, Eames considered it safe to say he had some idea.

Apparently Arthur had had the same thought, as his reply was a curt "Yes, Mr. Wayne. Though I can't imagine why you think his history would endear us to your cause."

"Arkham can't hold him." Wayne had never looked further from his page six appearances as he did now, tired, vulnerable, desperate, even. It said something about the state of Gotham City when even its richest and most powerful inhabitant, who ought to be completely unaffected by this sort of thing, had become a nervous wreck. "I poured hundreds of thousands into that place when he was first committed, and he was still back out on the streets in a matter of weeks."

Eames had considered pointing out that it was a staffing problem that had led to the escape, not a matter of security, but held his tongue on that portion of the story out of tact. "I'd imagine that whatever doctor they assign him this time will either be a straight man or a happily married woman. Have you ever considered that a proper therapist might be able to—"

"He's beyond help." The answer was so sudden and harsh that even Eames had been taken aback. Wayne rubbed a hand over his eyes and tried again. "You haven't—it's one thing to see it on the news. It's different when it's your city. He can't be rehabilitated and he's going to go on killing whenever he gets the chance. That's why I need you."

Arthur had remained decidedly unmoved by this performance. "Look, even if we could extract the latest plan from this maniac's head—if he even _knows _what his next plan is—we couldn't keep doing that on a regular basis. Extraction isn't that kind of business. Eventually his mind would adjust to the process and he'd realize what was happening and then the whole thing would go to hell. Either stand aside or we'll go through the window."

"But that's what you don't understand." Wayne had waved a hand at the file left neglected at the table. "I'm not asking you to go in there and figure out what he's planning. I'm asking you to go in there and make him want to stop."

As if that would make the idea any more palatable. "Stop?" Eames had repeated while Arthur remained silent, probably calculating just how much attention escape by window could draw to them. "Stop what, specifically?"

"All of it." His hands moved again, purposelessly, unable to gesticulate the frustration and worry and hopelessness of it all. "Stop killing, stop ruining lives, everything."

Arthur had slipped his hand back into his pocket again, but this time, it wasn't to retrieve his mobile. Eames knew without asking, from observing the habit for years now, that Arthur's loaded die was in his pocket, and the point man was checking its weight to make sure this wasn't someone's dream, because the request was far too bizarre to be made in reality. "You're asking for inception."

Wayne had nodded. "That's what I've been told the process is called, yes."

"If you've looked into inception, you must know that no one's ever been able to pull it off."

"You have." Wayne had given no explanation for how he knew, but the conviction in his face had made it clear that it wasn't a bluff. "Two years ago, when Fischer Morrow split back up into its component businesses. You were the ones responsible for that."

Arthur's patience had seemed to audibly snap, and Eames knew without asking the one thought that was running through his head: _Saito. _Saito would have to have been the one to let the information slip, between Cobb's swearing off of the whole business, Yusuf's return to Mombasa, and Adriane's return to university. All that and the fact that Saito was the only one who had any reason to come into contact with Bruce Wayne in the first place. Eames imagined a reunion of sorts was in order once they got out of this, and it wouldn't be a pleasant one. "Do you have any idea how dangerous inception is in a _sane _mind? And now you're asking us to risk—"

"If it's a matter of money—"

"No, it isn't a matter of money, and there's no amount of it that would make us accept your offer. You have our sympathy on the state of your city, Mr. Wayne, but you don't have our services and there's no argument you could make that would gain them." Arthur had pushed past the billionaire and shoved the door open, motioned for Eames to follow.

Eames, being a gentleman, could hardly bear to leave their would-be client standing there looking so distraught. "If it's any consolation," he had said, with a pat on the shoulder that Wayne didn't acknowledge, "it would have been bloody interesting."

* * *

"I fail to see the issue here," Saito said after a sip of tea, pretending not to notice just how close Arthur was to an apoplectic fit. "I recommended your services as any satisfied customer may be expected to do. You were offered a commission not to your liking and declined to take it. I could hardly be expected to know what sort of a request Mr. Wayne would make, and at any rate, you aren't being forced to take up his offer. A baffling meeting, to be sure, but a harmless one."

"The issue," Arthur said, teeth gritted, "is that _you _also saw it fit to give him Ariadne's number."

If he expected the remark to shame Saito, then he failed entirely. Saito only shrugged, brushing a nonexistent speck of dust from his sleeve. "She is a brilliant architect. Bruce Wayne was looking for the best and I wasn't sure if the five of you had kept regular contact."

They had, with the exception of Cobb, who'd said he needed time with his children now. Yusuf may have returned to Mombasa to care for his version of an opium den, and Ariadne may have finished her schooling in France and moved on to Stanford for psychology—playing armchair psychiatrist to both Cobb and Fischer had given her the insatiable desire to try the career in real life—but it didn't keep them from communicating.

"At any rate," Saito continued, "has Ariadne accepted his offer?"

"Not quite accepted," Eames replied quickly, before Arthur could work himself into a coronary by recounting their last conversation with her. "Wayne didn't outright ask her to participate, you see. He explained the offer that he made to us, and that we had refused, that the conversation had ended so abruptly he hadn't been able to get our suggestions for any other extractors who might be interested in the offer. So he said he was calling to ask her if she could think of anyone."

Saito let his amusement entirely overpower his tranquil look for the first time since they'd come in, burying it down again quickly. "He is more cunning than the tabloids give him credit for."

"And now she's calling us up saying that she thinks we ought to help the innocent citizens and that we can't let people who haven't performed an inception take this risk and how she thinks we might be able to help a terrorist and all other sorts of insanity." It was a wonder the cup didn't break in Arthur's hand, given how much his grip had tightened around it in the last sentence. If Bruce Wayne were here right now, Eames had no doubt that Arthur would snap the man's neck, despite the playboy weighing at least twice as much as him.

"Has she given him a definitive answer?"

"Not yet," Arthur admitted. He was still furious. It wasn't that Eames couldn't understand _why, _he just had no idea what Arthur had expected to accomplish from this meeting. What, was Saito meant to apologize profusely and promise never again to give their information to anyone who lived in a city in which people acting like superheroes and villains was considered common practice? It all came off as an exercise in futility.

"Then simply explain the dangers of the situation to her. Why shouldn't she heed your warning?"

_Should and would are two very different things where Ariadne's concerned. _"That's what we're trying." Eames tried taking the cup from Arthur's hands before it could become a projectile weapon, but the man might as well have super glued himself to the ceramic. "But she isn't always logical about this sort of thing."

At that, Saito nodded. "She has a great heart. Often, that works as an advantage, but there are always—"

"If she agrees to this, and she gets hurt, I'm holding you personally responsible."

Saito looked at Arthur the way a father might regarding a child who had decided that screaming until he ran out of oxygen was an appropriate tactic to get what he wanted. "Tell me, has it occurred to you that this procedure may not be dangerous at all?"

That implications of that statement left Eames gaping as well, even knowing that Saito was toying with them. "He's a nihilistic terrorist who dresses up as a clown and you think the inside of his mind might not be dangerous?"

"What I am saying is that you never know what you may find in the man's brain if you don't look." Saito raised a hand to silence Arthur before he could even start. "What were you expecting to find in Robert's mind? As I recall, not militarized projections and a street full of gunfire. But that's what we encountered."

Arthur's face reddened with the reminder of his nearly fatal—well, not so nearly—slip-up. "That's different. Any mind can be trained to defend itself against outsiders. That doesn't mean some aren't inherently more dangerous than others."

"Certainly. But how can you be sure that a particular mind is so perilous unless you check?"

Arthur downed the rest of his tea and slammed the cup against the coffee table, which was damned impressive, really, considering that he managed to do that on a coaster. "He's a mental patient."

Saito tilted his head toward Eames, appraising. "Didn't you once use dream-sharing to work with the mentally ill before you took up your current line of work?"

"Years ago." The technology had more use than just military training and extractions, though that was all the media tended to report on. The hospitals that could afford it sometimes used it with resistant psychiatric patients, and that had been his line of work until he'd found it wholly too depressing and moved on to brighter and better things. It was where he'd learned to forge; at least, where he'd learned to forge in the dream-sharing sense.

"Then you are the one with the most experience in this matter." Saito had a way removing himself from the situation that even Eames, with a lifetime of practice in misleading and manipulating others, had to envy. "As it stands, I say that the decision should be up to you."

* * *

AN: Okay, so, the rundown on the _Inception _characters and their world: In the film, there exists a device called a PASIV, which injects a drug called somnacin through an IV into whoever's hooked up to it. This drug knocks them out and allows them to share a dream. It was developed by the military for combat training, but it has since evolved to have other uses, such as extraction, which is the illegal invasion of someone's mind in order to steal information from their subconscious. Extraction teams generally have an extractor to take the information (Cobb in the film), a "point man," who researches the job's target in order to create a more convincing environment for the dream, as well as to find out secrets the team can use to their advantage, (Arthur), a chemist to make the drugs and sedatives needed to knock them out (Yusuf), and an architect to design the dream (Ariadne). They also may or may not have a forger, someone who can make himself look like other people while in a dream, to mislead the mark into thinking they're talking to someone they know (Eames).

There is also the extremely difficult process of inception, putting an idea in the mind instead of taking information out. In either case, the team needs to be sure not to alert the mark's projections (manifestations of the subconscious that take the form of people inside the dream) to the fact that this is a dream, because the subconscious will recognize the foreign nature of the dreamer and attack the invaders. One can train the subconscious to immediately recognize and attack invaders. In the film, the mark Robert Fischer had his subconscious so trained. The team was hired by Saito, Fischer's business rival, to incept Robert into believing that he ought to dissolve his company. It worked, but not without severe complications along the way.

People who frequently take part in dream-sharing often carry a totem: a small item with a certain property known only to them. For example, Arthur has a loaded die, and only he knows what number it will land on if dropped in reality. The totems are used to make sure that you aren't in someone else's dream—if Arthur was in someone else's dream, that person wouldn't know what number his die is meant to land on, so when he rolls it in the dream, the right number won't come up.


	3. Worth A Shot

AN: One other note for those who haven't seen _Inception_: I forgot to mention in my last note why inception is considered so hard and dangerous. In order to extract information from the mind, the extractor only has to create a dream and take information from that dream. But to perform inception, the idea needs to be buried extremely deep in the subconscious, so that the mark will believe the idea came from their own mind rather than someone else's suggestion. In the film, the team had to use a dream within a dream within a dream to do this. To achieve that many levels of dreaming, a very powerful sedative has to be used. Ordinarily, being killed by your mark's projections in a dream just means you'll wake up in reality. But with these sedatives, you can't wake up until they wear off, so instead the mind drops into limbo, another layer built up of nothing but raw infinite subconscious.

Now, the mind runs faster in a dream than in reality, to the point that five minutes in real life is an hour in the dream. Each level down, the effect is compounded, so by the time the mind reaches limbo, it's working in massive overdrive. It's possible to boot yourself back up into other levels of the dream from limbo by committing suicide there, since the mind has nowhere else to go, but because limbo is so deep into the subconscious the people in it tend to forget that it isn't the real world. Therefore, they stay there for decades of dream-time, and by the time they wake up, their minds are completely fried from running so fast for so long. To sum it all up: dying in an inception attempt is a good way to wake up brain dead.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

If Eames didn't enjoy being made the center of attention, he might have reached Arthur's level of frustration. As it was, he found himself more annoyed than angered, partly because the situations were hardly comparable, partly because he didn't care to be held culpable however this turned out, but mostly because Saito knew his history without being told. That indicated that he'd researched Eames's past—well, of course he had, he must have done it for all of them, but it was hardly something Eames liked to consider—which meant he probably had a file full of all sorts of classified information that a forger wouldn't want anyone to know.

He had always been stuck between considering Saito to be a magnificent bastard, or just a manipulative one.

"I hardly think I'm more qualified to make that choice than anyone else."

"We've already made our choice." Arthur's posture was so rigid that he looked like a cable on the verge of snapping. "And we decided not to have any part of it."

Saito, having apparently deemed Arthur a lost cause in this conversation, didn't as much as bother to break eye contact with Eames when the point man spoke. "You are the only one who has experience with the mentally ill. Why shouldn't you be more qualified?"

"The clinic in Bristol wasn't dealing with terrorist clowns, for one." Though, frankly, it might have been better if they had. Certainly it would have made his job far more entertaining.

Much as Eames had suspected, Saito didn't appear to be take that as a valid argument. "You must have dealt with violent patients at some point."

Well, obviously. The difference being that patients like Richard, who had beaten everyone at the lunch table senseless if another patient dared to touch anything on his tray, or Diane, who could cause injuries requiring stitches or worse whenever she felt particularly agitated, still had the distinct difference of having not attempted things like blowing up hospitals or trying to persuade civilians to kill prison inmates, and vice versa. "None at the clown's level. I doubt we'd even have been permitted to try shared dreaming with a patient like that."

"But you have worked with them," Saito persisted. For someone who claimed to be an unbiased observer in all of this, he certainly seemed invested. Eames supposed that when decades of limbo gave one the mind of a ninety year old—and that was rounding down—in the body of a young man, then there weren't a lot of new things left to experience, and watching one's coworkers struggle with a murderer in makeup would definitely be one of those remaining events.

"On occasion."

"And were their minds always violent?"

For the most part, the answer was yes. The patients who had been hostile in reality tended to have projections that were every bit as aggressive. Granted, they didn't attack unless provoked, like any projection, but the tension had always been there, hanging over their heads like a lightning bolt just waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Eames could think of more than one occasion in which he'd witnessed some violent, depraved act of the subconscious and had hoped that, if the projections did attack, he'd be killed quickly and avoid suffering through that level of pain.

But all in all, those moments had been rare in his career. While he had only worked with patients for about a year and a half, he'd also only worked with patients resistant to treatment, and the more aggressive patients made up a good portion of that workload. And out of around eighteen months at the clinic, he could count on one hand the number of times he'd felt that killing himself to wake up would be preferable to continuing on with what he was seeing in the dream. The minds he'd encountered tended to be violent because the conditions that had landed them here either interfered with their perception of reality or their ability to communicate, so the tendency to react belligerently was understandable, however socially unacceptable.

Though, once again, those patients hadn't tortured people to death on television or blown up police stations.

Arthur seized upon the lull in conversation. "He left that place. So he obviously wasn't enjoying it."

"I left because I've never been fond of highly scheduled environments, darling." If he were going to be accurate, he had left because dealing with people's misery day in and day out was hardly beneficial for his own mental wellbeing. The last straw had been an outpatient, a young child who was clearly traumatized over something but refused to speak at all, even to his own family. Eames had forged the boy's father and they'd spent the whole of the dream hiding from the projection of the mother, who was, as it turned out, was not only verbally but also sexually abusive. He'd lasted for a few more weeks after that, and then washed his hands of the whole business. It wasn't something he cared to dredge up now. "No, they didn't all have violent minds. And even those who did usually didn't threaten me."

"You weren't threatening them," Arthur countered. "Fischer's security backed off once we weren't holding him hostage. That didn't make it any less deadly while we were working."

"There might be a way to lead the clown around his subconscious without threatening him."

"Like what?" Arthur's eyes, dark and cunning but completely devoid of imagination, narrowed. That was his entire problem right there. Everything from his usual stick-up-the-ass in day to day interactions to his inability to even consider the possibilities to his latest job offer, it all boiled down to the lack of imagination. For all his brilliance in strategy, for all his ingenuity in reworking the situation when a plan went badly, Eames had concluded from years of observation that Arthur had no ability to think in the abstract, no way to accept a hypothetical that didn't have at least a seventy-five percent chance of success.

He was disadvantaged, really. Lucky for him that he had such wonderful friends to compensate for that glaring character flaw.

"I can hardly know what if I don't even know how we'd go about persuading him to stop killing people yet." Looking back, Robert Fischer's job had been easy. At least, strategizing for it had. Every newspaper article written about the man might as well have had "Fischer's Daddy Issues Develop Further" as its headline. Insofar as Eames knew, the Joker had never given interviews about what motivated him to kill people, and even if he had, they were probably about as credible as an issue of _The Sun._

"We _aren't _going to convince him of anything. We're not going into his head. And it doesn't matter what you think of that, my stance on it isn't going to change." That last bit was directed at Saito, as though he'd been leading the bickering back and forth rather than sitting in silence, witnessing it.

Saito, of course, remained unaffected as always. If that was what limbo could do for a man, then Arthur ought to consider it. Though it wouldn't be any fun to provoke him afterward, so maybe it would be better if he didn't try it after all. "It makes no difference to me what you decide. I only meant to ensure that you had examined all of the possibilities. I have no doubt that Bruce Wayne will find someone else willing to take the job."

Arthur scoffed.

Eames, in contrast, was left considering the outcome of another group's attempt at inception in a mind like the Joker's. If they succeeded, well, more power to them. If they didn't, the best case scenario was that they would all end up in limbo, and the worst that the clown would either remember it and come after them or have his mind altered to be even more destructive. Neither of which Eames would have any moral responsibility for—and, as a thief, he'd stopped caring about the ethics of the jobs long ago—but still, it wasn't an idea that he found exactly palatable.

Besides, and he was sure Arthur would strangle him for this, he couldn't deny that he was somewhat curious to see the inside of the clown's mind. Not curious enough to risk death over it, of course, but then, everything that had gone wrong during the inception had been a result of misinformation. They'd dealt with militarized projections before and, had Arthur's research uncovered that Fischer's subconscious had been trained, would have come down prepared for the gunfire. Meaning Saito wouldn't have been shot, and they could have continued the job at their planned place. Had Cobb been level with them about the risks of the sedatives, and the degree to which his own subconscious issues would affect the mission, then they could have compensated for that. Had everything been upfront and uncovered, then the inception wouldn't have held that much more of a risk than an ordinary job, save for the issue of death leading to limbo.

Of course, Fischer's mind, for all the heir's problems, hadn't been representative of an utterly insane person's.

"We could test it," he suggested, cutting off Arthur at the start of what had probably been a smart remark.

Both Saito and Arthur were staring at him now, and for once, Saito looked equally confused. "Test what?"

"Go into his mind and see if it's too dangerous or just—" He fiddled with a cufflink, struggling to think of the right word. "Just too nonsensical for us to do anything. One level with nothing but the somnacin. See if the projections attack on sight, and if not, see what they do if they or the Joker are directly threatened. We wouldn't need any special design for the dream, or additive to the chemicals, so we wouldn't have to involve Ariadne or Yusuf. If it's too much of a risk—and odds are that it will be—we just tell Wayne that we're not willing to put ourselves in that danger and go on our merry way. He'd probably be willing to pay through the nose just for that."

Arthur looked skeptical, but not as closed off as he'd probably like to appear. "And you really think he'd drop it after that?"

"We could bring him with us, if you like. See how willing he is to put people at risk when he's the one getting his entrails used to decorate a Christmas tree."

Arthur stared.

"Or, you know, whatever mad clowns with a penchant for explosives do for fun." All right, so the mental image of bloody holiday murder rituals hadn't been the best way to introduce the idea. Eames straightened in his chair, trying to give at least some semblance of seriousness. "The point is, by some miracle the man's mind might not be a minefield, and then it'd be a job like any other, wouldn't it? A very well-paying one."

Not one to be persuaded by shiny things, Arthur had gone even more rigid. If he got any stiffer they'd have to pry his hands from the armrests with a crowbar. Eames could almost hear Arthur's mind at work, gears whirling as he calculated every last little flaw. "And suppose he's a lucid dreamer and he remembers us? You want a serial killer to know that you invaded in his mind?"

It might have been a reasonable defense if said serial killer was someone who knew them, someone they came in contact with on a regular basis. As far as this argument went, it was weak. Eames forced himself to hold in a smile. Arthur might be wavering, but amusing as it would be, pissing him off would just get him to close back up again. "Even if he does remember the dream, why should he think we were made up of anything more than his synapses firing? It isn't as if he works in our field, and most anyone else with a vendetta against the clown would settle the score with a gunshot to the head, not an invasion of his subconscious. It isn't an attack he'd see coming." That, and inception was still thought by the majority of the world to be impossible, so supposing that he did remember a group of strangers telling him that killing is bad when he woke up, the odds that he'd link it to any sort of attack against him were still absolutely marginal.

"And that's a risk you're willing to take?" Ordinarily, Arthur would keep up this sort of argument for a good twenty minutes, out of principle if nothing else. Lack of sleep and debates with the Japanese upper class must have taken it out of him. Eames made a note to deprive Arthur of at least one night's rest before he ever suggested a vacation.

"It's hardly a risk if it's a glance in with only one level now, is it?" He didn't bother to mask the grin now. It was all but a foregone conclusion at this point and anyway, seeing Arthur getting flustered and trying to disguise it was always a day-brightener.

As if to prove his point, Arthur tried looking away only to be met with Saito's much more restrained smile. With a loud sigh—the most of a production Arthur was willing to make—he stood, shaking his head. "Fine. You can play explorer in the maniac's head if you want to. I'll supervise." He took the mobile from his pocket, searching for a signal. "And for the record, this is still one of the worst ideas you've ever had, and that's saying something."

"Duly noted. You're calling to inform Wayne, I take it?"

"You can call him." Arthur's voice was thick with disgust. "I'm arranging a flight back home."

"You needn't bother with that." Saito reached into his own pocket, retrieving a card. "Here."

Arthur stared at the card as though he expected it to launch itself across the room and ruin his suit. "What's that? Someone who wants us to extract from a death row inmate?"

Why did he insist on sarcasm when he knew it was only going to amuse Saito? "Nothing so spectacular. Only an address. I thought you might be tired after the sudden flight, so I booked a hotel room and arranged the ride stateside for tomorrow."

Maintaining some respect for hospitality through his otherwise all-consuming indignation, Arthur took the card, reading it over.

"The room is paid for, and you needn't worry about providing identification." Saito waited for gratitude to grace Arthur's features before adding, "I thought you might prefer not to use your real names, so I booked the room under 'Arthur Darling.'"

Eames was fairly sure Arthur managed to break the sound barrier, as fast as he stormed off.

* * *

AN: _The Sun _is a British tabloid. It's most well known for its "Page Three Girls," topless photos of women it has on the third page of the issues.


	4. Something of a Speciality

AN: Another note for anyone who's yet to see _Inception_: Michael Caine (Alfred in the Batman films) plays the father-in-law of DiCaprio's character in that film, a professor at a French university.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"I'm beginning to understand why Gotham City has such a high crime rate."

Arthur, in the time it had taken them to get here, had devoted a full forty-eight hours to fuming, pacing, muttering insults and vague threats, both at their previous employer and their new one, and finally, blissfully, sleeping. Eames had no idea how much sleep Arthur had managed in the hotel room, having lost consciousness himself during one of the man's many rants about Saito—"Just because he thinks limbo turned him into some sort of Jedi Knight, he justifies manipulating our lives" and so on and so forth—and by the time Eames had managed to pull himself out of bed, Arthur was already up and glaring at his breakfast. But he did know that Arthur had passed out before their flight to Gotham even reached cruising altitude, and he had remained that way until Eames shook him awake an hour or so before they landed, knowing Arthur would want the time to compose himself. His standard brooding glare just wouldn't take hold if his hair were mussed, now would it?

Bruce Wayne, with Arthur's suitcase in hand—Arthur had insisted that he could carry it himself, and Wayne, who was probably strong enough to carry both the suitcase and Arthur without much effort, had taken it anyway—turned around to face him. "Why is that?"

Arthur only shook his head.

"Might have something to do with the whole "inviting criminals into your home" thing," Eames suggested, swinging his own suitcase back and forth as he walked. It nearly collided with the briefcase that held the PASIV—Arthur had refused to let anyone else carry it, or even look at it too closely—and Arthur turned to him, scowled, and widened the space between them.

"Oh." The billionaire's face reddened, if only just, and with a slight nod, he turned away again and carried on down the hall, ahead of them but not, as Eames was sure, far enough off to miss Arthur's scoff.

They were meant to been put up in a hotel. It was one thing to invite an extraction team into one's home to discuss a job—and even then, most any employer chose to meet somewhere else—and quite another to let the mind-thieves bunk in the guest rooms while they planned, especially considering that the average job took months to set up. But the weekend Bruce Wayne chose to propose the job, by some stroke of cosmic irony, also happened to coincide with the opening of some new and highly anticipated casino, so every single hotel room beyond those in the worst part of the city was booked. The week after that, there was a major charity event, and then a convention the next week, and so on and so forth, so that the possibility of a hotel was out for at least a month and a half. Apparently, the people booking those rooms were just as rich or influential as Wayne, because he hadn't been able to bribe his way into a suite either.

"Doesn't he own a hotel?" Eames had asked after the phone call about their living arrangements had ended. Arthur had replied that the official explanation was that he had sold it to a friend he felt would have more time to manage the place, and that the real explanation was that Wayne had bet the place in a card game and lost.

"You don't own any apartments?" Eames had suggested over the phone, at which point Wayne had gone rather mumbly and mentioned something about remodeling and fumigation until Arthur had rolled his eyes and told Eames to forget it, and that they would take him up on the house offer now and make further arrangements once they arrived at Wayne Manor.

The manor, recently reconstructed according to their research and still touting that new house smell, wouldn't be a bad place to spend the next several weeks, or even the entirety of the job, if Arthur would allow it, and he most certainly would not. Which was a shame, because the decorum must have appealed to Arthur's tastes, even if it was lacking in that eye-burningly bright gold that always seemed to cover his dream levels. The manor clearly housed the wealthy, but it was understated about it, which made for a welcome change from the home of most CEOs that Eames had encountered in his work. Wayne's public persona was as gaudy and tactless as they came, but thankfully, his home didn't reflect that. Neither did Wayne when the spotlight wasn't on him, for that matter.

"These are the guest rooms." Wayne stopped, indicating the entire hallway before them. Eames wouldn't be surprised if this constituted an entire wing of the manor. "You can take any room that you want, but the ones at this end are going to be closer to the kitchen and all of that, obviously. Every two rooms on the same side are linked by a bathroom."

Arthur stepped into the first room on the left, flipped on the light, and regarded the room's contents. To anyone outside the world of espionage, he would appear to be deciding whether or not the guest room was aesthetically pleasing. In actuality, he was considering how open the room was to infiltration, going over theoretical escape routes and how long he estimated they would take, and gauging whether or not the furniture would work as potential barriers or makeshift weaponry.

Though he was probably judging the interior design while he was at it. This was Arthur, after all, and if gunfire were to break out around them at this very moment, he'd probably be just as concerned about keeping his suit intact as he would be with making it out alive. By some miracle of coincidence—that, or Wayne had researched them just as they had checked his past—what Eames could see of the bedspread was that exact shade of gold.

"I'll take it," Arthur said, setting the PASIV on something inside the door. He took the other suitcase from Wayne as Eames moved to the bedroom beside Arthur's. When given the option, it was safer to take a room on the same side of the hall, so that if an escape proved necessary, they wouldn't end up on opposite sides of the building and have to waste time and risk exposure searching for each other.

He deposited his own luggage by the foot of the bed, noting with mild relief that his bedspread wasn't the color of any precious metals, and moved back into the doorway. "So how's the food going to work out?"

Bruce Wayne gave him a dumbfounded look that would have been perfectly befitting for a playboy, were it happening in the middle of a drinking game or an argument with a former lover. In the middle of his own home, while showing guests around, it just made him look as though he'd try to jump into the criminal underground and found himself in far over his head. Which wasn't a bad description, really.

"Are we buying our own or raiding your cupboards?" Eames clarified. "Say, should I avoid the filet mignon because you'll be keeping a tab?"

"You have access to everything." He probably hadn't thought about it until he'd been asked. "I'm not going to charge you."

Considering just how large everyone's share was going to be for this job, there wouldn't be much point in charging them anyway. Wayne might as well be taking money from his own wallet and then handing it back to himself. "Excellent. I'll be sure and label all the cartons I drink from, so you won't have to guess."

Wayne was spared another moment of gaping by Arthur, who had emerged from the doorway, shaking his head. "Ignore him. He's a pathological idiot, but he's good at what he does."

Their employer didn't look quite reassured, but he nodded, stepping back. "Alfred and I will be up with the rest of the luggage in a minute. Make yourselves at home."

"And you don't have to worry about locking up the silver," Eames called after Wayne's retreating back. "We steal ideas, not family heirlooms. Not usually, anyway," he added to Arthur, sidestepping to avoid the slap his partner in crime had been aiming at the back of his skull. "Oh, lighten up, Arthur. How often is it that you find yourself in an all-expenses-paid mansion?"

Arthur, who had yet to accept the idea of this job and wouldn't have had any fun with it even if he had, was glowering. He'd had over two decades to perfect his glower—knowing him, he'd been practicing in the womb—and even Eames had to admit, it was imposing. "Would it kill you to take things seriously for once?"

"If it did, would you pay for the funeral?"

He didn't smile, of course. They needed the rest of the team with them, and soon. Explosive and enjoyable as it was to let their personalities clash like this, if it went on uninterrupted for too long, it could only end badly for everyone involved. Eames was about to leave the man to his own devices, so that Arthur could pace or iron his ties or whatever else it was he did to relax, when Arthur responded, deadpan, "If you didn't have the foresight to get life insurance? I'd put you in the backyard in a cardboard box."

Eames grinned, an action which Arthur did not return, though there was the slightest twitch to his mouth. "There may be hope for you yet, darling. Very slight hope, but there all the same."

Arthur, having apparently filled his quota of positive emotions for the day, was back to looking as though the world might end at any second before he had the chance to hang up all his laundry. "So how do you plan to get in the clown's head?"

"You haven't worked that out?" Arthur, much as he may hate certain assignments, had never given them any less than his utmost thought and attention to detail. By this point, Eames would have expected him to have a copy of Arkham Asylum's blueprints—with each exit highlighted—a hack into the security systems, and a printout of the work schedule for the month.

"It's not a real job yet." Arthur's hand was in his pocket, fiddling with the die. Eames couldn't tell if it was for lack of anything else to do with his hands or if he simply found it beyond belief that they'd agreed to do this much in the first place. That, or he was stunned that a billionaire was giving them free room, board, and dining. "So I'm leaving it in your hands."

Eames's own totem, a poker chip with various notches carved into it at meaningful angles, was in his pocket, and he felt tempted to take it in hand and ensure that he was in reality himself. Arthur trusting the plans to someone else without at least a half dozen evaluations was unheard of. Then again, this probably wasn't trust as much as giving Eames just enough rope to hang himself. "Get into his cell in the night while he's already out and hook him up to the PASIV there."

"And the security?" Arthur knew the answer as well as he did, but if the man wanted to play twenty questions rather than to sit and glare at everything that dared to exist while he was in a bad mood, then more power to him.

"If Wayne has the money to pay for this job, he has the money to pay off the staff." He practically owned the building as it was, judging from his massive donations that had continued even after the Joker had escaped and no other benefactors wanted to be associated with the place.

"And if he's not asleep?"

"If the staff is willing to ignore the infiltration of a man's mind, I doubt they'll have many qualms about adding a sleeping pill to the nightly medications."

Arthur's mouth twitched again. It was always this way after he got especially angry about something: he had the bad habit of analyzing that anger over and over just as he studied every detail of a mark's past or a dream layout. He couldn't just let it go, even when it clearly wasn't that great a source of agitation any longer. It would be at least another twenty-four hours before he got back to smiling like a regular human being. "What dream are you taking him into?"

Typical Arthur. If there was slightest snag in the design, he would find it. "I was thinking I'd bring him into the asylum, since he's spent so much time there. It ought to give us a good idea of how his mind works from day to day." He left the unspoken complication hanging in the air between them, knowing exactly how to articulate it but not wanting to when Arthur was finally near his version of relaxation.

"But?" Arthur prompted.

"Well, I've looked at the blueprints of the hospital, designed a maze from it and all of that, and I'll have plenty of time to look over the interior and while I'm there, but I'd like to get a feel for it in the day time when the patients are awake. We're trying to see how he interacts with his projections after all, and he can't interact with them if everyone in his head ought to be sleeping."

"I didn't realize it was so hard for you to change the lightning from night to day." He really was good at dry humor when he tried. Pity he almost never had a sense of humor about anything said back to him.

"Ha ha. Look, face paint aside, the man is brilliant. That's one of the reasons you've been so opposed to this, isn't it?"

Arthur gave a reluctant nod.

"Exactly. And if there's any chance of tipping the clown off that something isn't right, if he's a lucid dreamer who might remember faces, well, much as I like gambling, it isn't a risk I'd like to take. Every last detail has to be perfect. You of all people should agree with that."

"The asylum gives tours, doesn't it? Go on one of those. I doubt they take visitors to the high security wing, so the clown won't see you."

_And here it goes. _The part that would make whatever semblance of a good mood Arthur had developed dissolve away like a chalk drawing introduced to water. "Yes, but I've been thinking. Since we'll have to study the man's mind so closely to figure out how we'd go about incepting him—"

"If we're going to at all." There was no twitch to his mouth now. Eames would miss it when it was gone for good—or at least another week—and by his calculations, that would be at some point in the next five seconds.

"Yes, of course. Well, either we're going to explore the workings of his subconscious as closely as possibly by breaking into his cell every night, or—"

"Or?" Arthur's eyebrows were already on the verge of narrowing. His lack of faith was disheartening, if expected.

"Well, I hear that they haven't officially assigned the clown another therapist yet."

And there it was. The look on Arthur's face would have put even Eames's mother's disapproving stares to shame. "You can't be serious."

"If he does remember his dreams, he won't think it's odd that I keep popping up in his mind, will he?"

"And if he does find it odd, he's going to come after you. Eames, if you won't think of your own safety, at least think of everyone else's."

There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs, echoing through the vast and mostly empty entryway. Two sets. The billionaire and his hired help, no doubt. "I'll bet the butler's imported," Eames said with admittedly forced good cheer, as though his positive attitude would transfer to Arthur rather than being absorbed by the man's black hole of disapproval and disgust.

"Eames—"

"Which of you owns the Vuitton suitcase?"

It was the butler, who, to Eames's delight, was indeed imported and British at that. Wayne followed behind him with Eames's own bag, looking a good deal less flustered, but Eames could hardly take his eyes from the hired help to notice. The man—Alfred, Wayne had called him?—had to be at least twice his employer's age, but there was no stoop to his shoulders even though Arthur's luggage must be packed to the brim in his suits. The butler made carrying someone else's things look not only dignified, but imposing. And most striking of all, he had quieted Arthur at the start of what would have been an hour-long lecture.

Upon closer examination, Arthur was more than just silent. He was gaping, as he had with Fischer back in Tokyo, though Eames couldn't discern why. It wasn't as if the butler were damaging the suitcase, or carrying it any other way than Arthur himself would have.

"It's his," Eames said finally, when it became clear that Arthur too preoccupied with treating people like sideshow attractions to speak. "He's in there." He jerked a hand toward the room Arthur had chosen and the butler took the suitcase in, though not without a sideways glance at them as he did.

"I'll be preparing dinner, Master Wayne," he said once he had stepped back into the hall, heading toward the stairs. "Let me know if you need anything."

"All right." Wayne had yet to deposit Eames's bag, having noticed Arthur's gawking as well. "Do you two need anything?"

"Arthur." Eames nudged him in the shoulder, which seemed to bring the point man at least somewhat back to reality. "Didn't your parents ever tell you to use your words? You've certainly never been hesitant with them before."

Arthur shook his head as if to clear it. "Your butler."

"Alfred?" Wayne supplied.

A nod. "Does he…does he have any relatives who teach? In Paris?"

Wayne's expression was lost as ever, and Arthur's matched it now. "Not to my knowledge."

"He looks just like Miles," Arthur murmured, more to himself than either of them.

Miles. Cobb's father-in-law, who had recommended Ariadne to the team and had apparently taught Cobb everything he knew about shared dreaming. Eames had never met him, for all the influence he'd had on their merry band. "Lovely. When's dinner?"

"There's something wrong with this city, " Arthur muttered, again to himself.

Eames decided that it would best to make advances in the plan while Wayne was off-guard and more receptive and Arthur was in no state to complain. "If we're going to perform an inception," he said, taking his bag from Wayne and swinging it into his doorway without losing eye contact, "I'm going to need to infiltrate Arkham and act as the Joker's psychiatrist. Can you handle that?"

Arthur came back into himself at that, but Wayne recovered the ability to speak first, so another bout of whinging was successfully averted. "It can be done," he said slowly, mulling it over in his mind, "but it won't be a fast process. You're going to need references on top of the paperwork."

Eames released a broad grin that had conned more than a few people out of their wallets and once, someone out of his entire home. "References aren't going to be a problem."

* * *

AN: Arthur owns a Vuitton suitcase because he's a total Francophile. In my interpretation, anyway.


	5. The Mark

AN: So an absurdly long amount of time has passed since my last update, and I apologize for that. I won't bore you with all the details, but essentially, real life got in the way and my decisions on how to handle it weren't the most productive. I've been meaning to get back to writing for months now, but it wasn't until I had three _Inception_-related dreams in succession—either my subconscious is trying to tell me something, or my readers got their hands on a PASIV—that I felt properly motivated enough to continue. I am going to give it my all to be better about updating from here on out.

To everyone who's sent me a review in the past few months: Thank you and I'm sorry I've taken so long to reply.

* * *

To its credit, Arkham Asylum looked nothing the neglected, demonic bedlam house so many Internet paranormal sites had made it out to be. Eames hadn't gone looking for ghost stories in his research, but it was hard not to read at least one or two—or a dozen—when every other result on the Google search had been something about troubled spirits or cursed origins. Going by the legends he'd heard, he ought to have been confronted with bleeding doors, secret passageways, and a score of ghosts within a few moments of setting foot inside.

Instead, he found himself greeted with a perfectly modern facility, recently renovated, judging from the lingering scents of construction beneath the more powerful odors of disinfectant and bodily fluids. Apparently, Bruce Wayne had donated to more than just the building's security budget.

Likewise, Ruth Adams, the psychotherapist in charge of organizing his preliminary visit—Dr. Arkham, he'd been informed, was at yet another press conference regarding the clown's escape and return—was far from the Nurse Ratched the urban myths made the staff out to be. True, she had scrutinized "Dr. Callahan's" ID—Arthur had objected to the use of his surname, but if Eames was going to spend the next few months among mad people, he wanted at least some amusement out of it—a bit too long for comfort, but Arthur's proofreading had caught each and every misspelling and apart from that, she was perfectly polite, if brisk.

"I can't believe you traveled three thousand miles to deal with him," she muttered, leading him through the controlled chaos of the rec room.

Eames arched a brow. "Really? A high profile case like this? I'm surprised more people haven't jumped at the chance." Following her pace while getting a good look around was difficult, but he still managed to collect the number of couches, and the position of the bookshelves, television, and the rest of the main items. "Is he allowed out here?"

"No, thank God." Her shoulders had tensed at the question. "No, he's been in the high security ward ever since we got him back." Adams swiped her key and held the door open, Eames lingering a second or so behind to take in the finer details. "It's not that we haven't had offers. But most of the legitimate ones disappeared after the Joker showed he could escape from the hospital, and the rest—" She shook her head, sensibly high heels click-clacking against the tiled floor. "We can't afford another Harley."

"Harley?"

"Harleen Quinzel, sorry." From what Eames could see of Adams' expression in profile, the thought of the failed intern alone was enough to make the therapist's lip curl. "I'm sure the papers in Britain covered _that_ fiasco?"

Eames hadn't been across the pond since the asylum breakout made international news, but he found it hard to imagine that every lurid detail and salacious rumor hadn't been splattered across the pages of _The Daily Mail. _Not to imply that more reputable journalists had let the story lie. It wasn't every day that a psychiatrist fell in love with a terrorist, freed him from captivity, and joined him in his life of crime, and when that day did arrive, any reporter worth his salt—and with the funds to make a flight to Gotham—would be there, pen in one hand and a notepad in the other. "I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But from what I understand, the administrator had no choice but to assign her?"

"_Yes._" It was quite impressive, the amount of venom Adams could put into a single syllable. Impressive and mildly horrifying. Eames made a mental note to stay off of her bad side in his time here, lest he find himself on the receiving end of either her sharp tongue or her equally sharp heels. "His attorney demanded that someone unbiased toward his actions handle the case, and she'd started work after the clown's first rampage, never mind that she had next to no experience and the mentality of some pop psychologist auditioning for a talk show—"

"So who's treating him now?" It seemed safer to steer the conversation to something that wouldn't induce a coronary in his guide. Like a sheepdog driving its flock, though Eames imagined this particular sheep was more than capable of organizing a coup and assuming leadership herself, if she so chose.

Instead, she inhaled slowly, looking as grateful for a change of subject as he was. "Right now? No one."

"Not at all?"

Another shake of the head. "Not unless there's an incident and someone has to file a report. Again, we can't touch the case because we're "too close to the client's alleged actions to make a fair assessment." Because keeping him isolated behind a wall of red tape is so productive for his mental well-being. We have the nurses and orderlies come down and speak through the door so he's not completely devoid of mental stimulation, but they're uncomfortable doing it and he rarely responds."

Eames glanced down to the clown's file, which Adams had shoved into his hands upon his arrival. It was thin, with Quinzel's session notes having been confiscated by the police, consisting only of the perfunctory: check-in forms, incident reports, patient schedules, and a list of prescriptions. "So you can't treat him but you're allowed to medicate him?"

"Not without one hell of a fight." Again, Adam's expression indicated that this subject was best left undisturbed, so Eames focused his attention on the path they were trudging out, deeper and deeper into the heart of the asylum. Even recently renovated, there was something a little unnerving about going down hall after windowless hall, though he imagined that had more to do with the mad clown at the end of the path than the journey itself. "He refused medication with Quinzel. The second time around, we made it clear that the court would have to find him a new hospital if they didn't let us drug him." She stopped walking, turning to face one of the doors. "This is his room."

The door was metal and, from the look of it, thick enough to stop a herd of agitated elephants. There was a sliding tray for the passing of food, drugs, and other essentials, and a small window with two layers of safety glass, wire mesh sandwiched between them. A glance inside revealed more or less what Eames had expected: a padded cell, empty save for the restraint bed in one corner, and the toilet and sink in the other. The only unexpected thing was the decorum: there were faint markings on the wall, forming pictures Eames couldn't make out from his distance. "What does he draw with?"

"Crayons. See?" She shifted to the side, allowing her companion a better viewing angle. The Joker sat on the floor, back to them, pressing either a blue or violet crayon firmly against the wall, as though trying to leave a more vivid imprint against the padding. Lacking the orange jumpsuit Arkham protocol dictated high security patients to wear, he was dressed instead in a deep blue anti-suicide smock, traces of green dye still remaining in his hair. "The custodians weren't happy about it, but if he doesn't have something to occupy him then he resorts to hurting himself, so we've given in to a few of his more innocuous requests."

Eames was surprised the crayon didn't break in two, as quickly and as forcefully as the clown was moving it. The Joker's entire body was tensed like a cable wound to the breaking point, just waiting snap and strike bystanders as it flew apart. "Fascinating."

"Let's hope you still think so after the session tomorrow."

* * *

The clown looked different sleeping.

The nervous energy that had pervaded his body during its waking hours had disappeared, leaving him limp and defenseless—at least, physically—on the bed. Unconscious, he looked almost like an ordinary person, albeit it one with questionable taste in hairstyles. It was the scars that shattered the illusion of normalcy, yet without the facial tics Eames had seen on many a news broadcast, even his disfigurement seemed cast in a new light. Sleeping, he looked like the victim of a tragic accident. Young, wounded, innocent, even.

Even after all his years forging, Eames never failed to be astounded by how different his marks and colleagues appeared when the defenses of consciousness were stripped away.

Wayne, however, looked less marveled at the murderous psychopath's more docile appearance than he looked ill at ease. Or just plain ill; judging from the billionaire's expression, he was one unexpected sound away from heaving sick all over his custom Italian shoes. Eames could hardly blame him. While Wayne had confirmed he'd had training in shared dreaming—what CEO hadn't, in this day and age—it was one thing to learn how to recognize extractors and quite another to enter the mind of a man who was likely to string them by their kidneys on meat hooks whether or not he realized they were intruders. "You're sure the sedative worked?"

Answering by way of demonstration, Eames took hold of the Joker's shoulders and shook him. The man's head shifted back and forth against the bed, but the manhandling elicited no other response beyond the clown's hair getting a bit mussed. "He should stay sleeping until morning."

There was no worry of discovery, either: the doctors had gone home for the night, the only nurses left in the building were on shift in the infirmary, and any orderlies that Wayne hadn't paid off were being kept from the area by those that he had. Bringing billionaires along for the ride did have advantages, Eames had to admit, despite the difficulties that bringing Saito on the Fischer job had created. It wasn't as though Eames had never paid someone off to gain access to a mark, but he'd never been ushered in with the hushed reverence given to local celebrities before, and nor had he ever been offered a drink by those he was bribing. "Are you sure you want to come along?"

With most of the color returning to his face, Wayne nodded. "I'm not making anyone else take the risk until I know what it's like." The man was a regular humanitarian when he wasn't being a drunken idiot. The average CEO—well, the average CEO wouldn't have requested this job in the first place, but if he had, he certainly wouldn't come along to scope things out.

Satisfied that the man wasn't going to flee the room and probably wasn't going to asphyxiate on his own vomit during the preliminary look, Eames lifted the PASIV briefcase onto the bed beside the Joker's sleeping form and snapped it open. "The medications are likely to make the dream either highly vivid or extremely unstable." He took the clown's wrist in hand, searching for a vein. "Don't be surprised if it's different from your other experiences."

Wayne didn't look as though he could even bring to mind his past shared dreams at the moment. "How long are we going under?"

"Five minutes should be enough." He slid the needle in the Joker's arm, then taped it in place. "All I need is to know how hostile his projections are to threats, and how much his subconscious affects the stability of the dream. Here." He extended the second IV to Wayne, who fumbled to place it with unpracticed hands. "If things get to be too much before the time is up, we'll just shoot ourselves."

His companion hardly looked comforted by the thought. Eames realized the moment after he said it that perhaps it had been a bit tactless to bring up firearm suicide in front of a man made orphan by a shooting, and so busied himself with his own IV in substitute of conversation. "Are you ready?"

Wayne lay back on the padded floor, on top of the what appeared to be the Joker's crayon rendering of Dali's _The Burning Giraffe._ "As ready as I'll ever be."

Eames nodded, attempting to transfer the PASIV to the floor without yanking the needles from anyone's wrist. He reclined against the floor, propped up on one elbow, fingers of the opposite hand poised over the button. "See you inside."

There was a hiss of drugs releasing, a feeling of cold as the somnacin crept through his veins, and then nothingness.

* * *

AN: Apologies for the shortness of this chapter: I originally intended for it to cover the experience inside the Joker's mind as well, but that made it far too long, and I think that sort of encounter deserves a chapter of its own anyway.

The type of hauntings Eames expected to encounter in Arkham are pretty much verbatim from _Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth_, which is also the graphic novel that contains the character of Ruth Adams.


	6. At First Glance

AN: And here's our first look into the Joker's mind. I decided while writing it that I've been watching far too many survival horror game walk-throughs online.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Eames opened his eyes and the floor lurched beneath him.

No, not lurched. There was no question that, beneath the padded floor of the Joker's subconscious cell, the very foundations of the asylum were moving, but the movement wasn't, as Eames found when he lost his balance and braced his hands against the bed to keep from falling, quite as dramatic as he'd thought when caught unaware. The entire room was shaking, but minutely, and only back and forth. Having ascertained that they were in no immediate danger of having the ceiling collapse and decapitate them, Eames turned his attention to Bruce Wayne.

It was easier said than done; the cell was overly bright in the dream, as if the padding were illuminated from the inside. Squinting, he could make out that the material of the walls seemed to glisten in places, as though someone had splashed the fabric with oil. Wayne, who had found his balance in spite of the vibrations, was also examining their surroundings, one hand raised to shield his eyes. He looked nauseated, and Eames couldn't say that he blamed him. "Why did you design it like _this_?"

"I didn't." Gingerly, Eames straightened. Keeping balance was easier now that he expected the floor to tremble beneath him, like maintaining one's footing on a moving train. As long as Wayne's motion sickness wasn't catching, the most annoying thing about their current conditions was the sound: the constant rattle from the vibrations around them hardly helped to lessen the paranoia of entering a madman's mind. "His sensitivity must be heightened—either medication or mental illness could cause that—and he's drawing in details from the outside."

"He's aware of what's happening?" Wayne nearly lost his footing at that, though he regained himself effortlessly. He tensed, enough to stand motionless on the shaking floor, body at the ready as though the clown would leap out at any moment with an array of semiautomatics and vegetable dicers.

Which wasn't out of the realm of possibility, actually. Eames had encountered far stranger things in his time. "No, it isn't intentional. It's like—look, I have a niece with autism, and she could never sleep through the night. When she got old enough to explain what the trouble was, they realized she could hear the clock in the hall ticking while she was in bed and to her, it was loud enough to keep her up. He's not picking up details knowingly, he's just more sensitive to them."

Wayne relaxed somewhat, though he still looked poised to defend against a clown attack. "What could he possibly pick up that would cause this?"

The PASIV, perhaps; the machine did vibrate when it first released the chemicals, but it stopped almost immediately thereafter, and while the Joker's mental state may prolong the feeling, Eames couldn't imagine the split-second of mechanical whirring would translate past a few minutes here. It could be the hum of the cell's fluorescent lighting, which they had turned on for ease of operations; Lord knows the lights were having enough of an effect. But if that were the case, the majority of the shaking ought to come from the ceiling.

"The ventilation."

"What?"

There had been one small vent sandwiched around the padding on the floor, not far from the bed, and welded into place so the patients couldn't go about wrenching it free and bludgeoning the staff. "It's the air coming through the vents."

Scratching at his wrist, Wayne gave a brief nod before turning his attention to examining the cell. "Where's the Joker?"

The door was closed, but not locked. "I only designed the ground floor of the asylum," Eames said, ushering his companion into the hall. "Any exits or stairs loop back on themselves, so he shouldn't be too difficult to find."

The hallway walls were more of a cream color in comparison to the pure white of the Joker's cell, which made the dream's illumination slightly more bearable. The oil slick reflections, however, still glistened on the walls, and Eames, for all his experience in shared dreaming, couldn't make heads or tails of it. There was nothing in the waking cell that should have left such an impression, nothing on the walls of the real cell except for crayon markings, and those could hardly affect the clown once he'd closed his eyes. It was as if the man's subconscious were staining the dreamscape with its mere presence.

Eames thought of saying as much to Wayne, biting his tongue when he noticed that the billionaire was again preoccupied with clawing at his wrist. "Are you all right?"

"I can still feel the needle." He said it matter-of-factly, but the imprint of his nails against his skin was reddened and frantic. "That—that's not normal, is it?"

"Could be that the needle's slightly off." Most people trained in shared dreaming outside of the espionage business didn't get much practice at it past the initial teachings, so a crooked IV was the most likely explanation. There could be some contamination to the somnacin or the needles, but if that were the case, Eames ought to be feeling it too—

There was a sharp but hushed intake of breath from Wayne, eyes widened and focused down the hall, and Eames whirled—shoes sliding against the shaking floor and nearly knocking him to the ground—to face the creature that had appeared in the hall.

"Creature" was the only way to describe it: it had the form of a human being but none of the features. It was naked, but there were no genitalia or other markings of gender by which to even begin to identify it. Its skin appeared to have the correct texture, but it was an ashen, pale shade Eames had never seen on anything living, and it lacked the translucent quality of real skin, with nothing to suggest the layers of muscle, vein, or fat beneath the surface. The only thing visible under the skin was in the chest, right below the sternum, and Eames couldn't begin to identify it, couldn't even make out an organ or other object, only seeing an electric blue light, like that of a police siren, emanating from within the figure. He watched, unmoving with Wayne equally still beside him, as the thing advanced down the hall, walking similarly to a human but with none of the subtlety, unfettered by the vibrations of the floor, and the light flickered to a sickly green.

It had no face, the skin stretched across its skull as smooth and featureless as over the rest of its body. There were no eyes, no mouth, and no protrusions where the nose or brow ridge ought to be. No ears, no hair. If it could breathe, there was no rise and fall of the chest to indicate it.

It was closing the space between them, though there was no indication from the creature that it was even aware of their presence. Eames wasn't sure he wanted to know how the thing would indicate that anyway; he'd dealt with his fair share of disturbing imagery throughout his career but if this thing began making noises in spite of its apparent lack of vocal cords and charging, then this little encounter would most certainly make his list of Top Ten Dream Experiences I Never Want to Have Again. He could feel Wayne's eyes slowly drift to him, could almost hear the gears in the man's mind working—_Should I dream up a gun? Do we leave? What do we do?—_and opened his own mouth, meaning to whisper, to try and reassure the billionaire that they should at least wait to see if the thing was hostile before giving it provocation.

His assurances proved themselves unnecessary when the creature turned, pushed open the door of one of the cells, and stepped inside without even an eyeless glance back at them.

Eames realized he had been holding his breath and slowly released it.

"What the hell was that?" Wayne's face had gone as ashen as the creature's skin, but to his credit, he projected a reasonable air of calm beyond that.

"One of his projections. Come on." Eames took a step forward and, having managed to forget the shaking floor during their close encounter, barely managed to avoid falling on his face. "We'd better find the Joker before that thing decides it objects to our presence after all." How it would track them down without eyes, he wasn't sure and didn't care to test. "I'd rather not attract more of them by shooting until I find its weak points."

"But projections are supposed to be people," Wayne protested, scratching at his wrist again. The gesture seemed to have become something of a security blanket.

"Not necessarily. In our last job the mark projected her cats. There were still people, of course, but it's not uncommon to find pets or—"

"Are you suggesting that those things are _pets_?"

Well, if they were, the Joker must have a terrible time searching for pet sitters. "No. But I think they will be a highly interesting insight into his mind, if we see how he interacts with them." _Left turn here, then a right at the end of the hall…_

"So shouldn't we be checking these cells?" Despite his increasing calm as they distanced themselves from the projection—if there were more of those things in the cells around them, they weren't visible from the windows—Wayne still looked as though he might be ill at any moment. How did someone who suffered from motion sickness this badly own a private plane, let alone a yacht?

"I think he'll choose something more open than that. He doesn't exactly enjoy confinement, does he?"

If Bruce Wayne had an answer to that, Eames missed it, being preoccupied with recalling the steps from the Joker's cell to the rec room. Another right, third door on the left. There. The handle turned without resistance. It had required a key card in reality, but Eames had thought the Joker would prefer an asylum without locks. He pushed the door open.

The room was full of the creatures.

All right, "full of" was just a bit over-dramatic, but when one opened a door to be confronted with a group of faceless and glowing abominations, it was difficult not to dip into the histrionics. The room was far from full, but there were at least a dozen of the things, some with green light, others with blue or white or yellow and so on, scattered across the room. There were a few seated on the couch, staring—if it were possible to stare without eyes—at the television, which appeared to be showing static with bits of foreign infomercials interspersed. There was one standing in front of the bookcase, though it made no move to touch any of the volumes on the shelves, and some simply milling about the room.

In the back, there was a group of them seated around a table, and that was where they found the Joker.

His hair was a vivid green now, with no traces of blond beneath the dye. It was still matted and greasy as it had been on so many news clips of his arrest, but the green now seemed to be the only color, at least from this distance. He was wearing the purple coat instead of the asylum's smock or jumpsuits, and he appeared to be conversing with the creatures at the table, though his body language was too erratic for Eames to discern his mood. The projections were the Joker's view of people, their actions made that obvious, though Eames couldn't be sure if they were meant to represent patients or staff or both. What was less obvious was just what made the clown view them as these featureless things. Disgust? Fear? A sense of alienation? It could be any number of things.

Wayne's eyes were on him again and together they moved forward, nearing the Joker's chair. The projections didn't react, not as much as an eyeless version of a stare in their direction. Eames thought back to his days in the Bristol clinic; even among the patients there, he doubted he'd ever encountered such listless projections. And considering that some of the aforementioned patients had been catatonic, that was quite an accomplishment.

The Joker and the others appeared to be playing cards, now that Eames was close enough to make out the details. At least, they all had cards in their hands, but it was unlike any game he had ever witnessed. The Joker had at least fifteen cards, some of which weren't even facing him, while the projection to his right held only two. The cards that hadn't been dealt to the players lay heaped in the center of the table, with no rhyme or reason that Eames could discern. Moreover, there was something wrong with the cards themselves: the more he studied them, the more they seemed to shift without changing position in the players' hands, and their shadows seemed everywhere at once, including the air in front of them.

"Do you even know how this game wor_ks_?" the Joker asked the projection across the table, his tone a mix of skepticism and apathy. His face was covered in the garish face paint he was famous for, but his subconscious self had also coated his neck in white, as well as the small gap of skin between his sleeves and his gloves. There was no human color left visible.

The projection's light flushed pink and it stood, leaving its shape-shifting cards behind as it shuffled away from the table. The Joker didn't bother to watch its retreat, his eyes falling instead on the newcomers. He didn't speak at first, gaze darting between the strangers, and Eames expected Wayne to tense as he had when confronted with the first projection, but apart from his seasick complexion, his employer looked calm. Well, faceless abominations were a new terror; the Gothamites had had around two years to adjust to homicidal clowns.

"You," the Joker said, and his hand shot out, grabbing Wayne's wrist, the scratch marks still visible beneath the cuff of his sleeve. Wayne did react at that, lip curling as though he'd been exposed to a leper, but the Joker paid no attention, pulling him closer to the table. "You play." He released his grip and Wayne, bewildered, took the seat opposite the clown. He regarded the cards before him as if he'd been asked to use them to perform brain surgery.

"What are you playing?"

The Joker scoffed, but his attention had turned back to his own cards and he didn't bother to look up as he answered, "Uh, fourth di_men_sional bridge, what else?" He gave no indication of having noticed a difference between the human features of his new playmate and the blank faces of his projections. Either he hadn't noticed the discrepancy or he didn't find it worth his attention. Either way, he'd made it clear that out of sight was out of mind, so Eames left Wayne to work out the rules of fourth dimensional bridge on his own, opting instead to test just what, if anything, would drive the projections to hostility.

One projection was still standing before the bookcase, its hand lingering over the books without as it contemplated. Eames didn't bother to try taunting it—even though the clown seemed able to communicate with his projections, it seemed an exercise in futility, mocking something without ears—taking the more direct route of punching it where its face should be, with enough force to send it staggering back against the nearest couch.

The projection's light flashed a dull red, and Eames picked up one of the heavier books from the shelf, on the chance that a makeshift weapon should prove necessary. Bruce Wayne, who looked so uncomfortable at the Joker's table that he might as well be sitting on a nest of fire ants, lay his cards down, at the ready to offer assistance.

But as the projection righted itself, the light flickered to yellow and it turned, trudging around the couch to sit, head bowed. The other projections, having yet to look away from the television, didn't respond to its presence.

_Well, that's…new. _Eames had never seen a projection fail to defend itself before, however weakly or briefly, not even in the most heavily sedated patients. At the very least, the other projections should have acknowledged the threat before deciding it wasn't worth the effort. The Joker hadn't noted it either; back at the table, he was muttering to himself, something about "why couldn't Arkham have the game with the princesses and the jewelry."

Eames turned his attention to the book he'd picked up. It was hard back and deep blue, with no dust jacket or title listed on the spine. He flipped it open—the subconscious filled books and videos just as it manifested projections—and found the text inside printed in a brownish red, as though someone had formed ink out of rust stains. Eames tilted the book up, beginning to read, but he hadn't progressed past the second word when the ink began to run, as though turning the book had spilled the words out, dripping down from the spine in a viscous liquid that splattered against the floor, shaking with the vibrations for a moment like grease in a skillet before it faded into the tiles.

_Publishing standards have certainly slipped._ He replaced the book on the shelf and headed back to the card table, ignoring Wayne's questioning look. The Joker was intent on his cards—by observation, this game was played at least in part by taking cards at random and throwing them on the table—and remained that way, ignoring the footsteps approaching behind him until Eames tapped him on the shoulder. "Hey clown. Shouldn't you be at a children's birthday party?"

The Joker stared, looking more bewildered than anything else. He barely interacted with his projections, judging from Eames's inspection thus far, and as they were lacking mouths, it was doubtful any of them had ever insulted him. He blinked, once, twice, and right when Eames expected him to shrug it off and go back to the cards, laughed. Eames could hardly call it a pleasant sound—it was like a combination of a laryngitic cough and hyena's cackle—but there was no audible malice to it. "_That's _the best you can do? You couldn't even have gone with, uh, a rodeo? Wow." The Joker shook his head, his grin taking up roughly the lower third of his face. "You're an idiot," he said admiringly, offering his hand.

So insults did nothing. Eames raised his own hand, but rather than taking the clown's, slapped him across the face. The force was enough to split his lip; the Joker brought a hand up to survey the damage, and stared at the blood on his glove in wonder. His face paint hadn't smeared. In this world, it seemed to be permanent. Giggling again, he licked the blood away from his lip and regarded his attacker. "Nice one. But I can do better."

There was a flash of purple, then a blinding white pain as the clown's fist broke his nose. Eames raised his hand to stem the gushing flow of blood, regaining his senses just in time to see the Joker shooing another of the projections away and inviting Eames to join the game.

They spend the rest of the hour trying to work out exactly how one played fourth dimensional bridge.

* * *

Eames opened his eyes to find Bruce Wayne already sitting up, yanking the IV from his arm as though it were a poisonous snake. His nails were raking over his wrist again before moving upward to arm, then neck, then face, and as Eames sat up, clearing the sleep from his eyes, he recognized the source of the problem, both for his current predicament and Wayne's ill complexion in the dream: Wayne was broken out, head to toe from the looks of it, in hives.

Allergic reactions to somnacin were rare, with only about one in ten thousand users having a reaction. Of those, only a handful were fatal, with most resulting more mildly, with vomiting or, in Wayne's case, hives. Easily enough treated after the fact, and easy enough to prevent by adding antihistamines or the like to the chemical cocktail. But they had only used somnacin for this procedure, and it hadn't been a contaminated batch; Eames and the Joker would be reacting as well if it were. And if Wayne had been trained to protect against extractors, he ought to know already that he was allergic.

"You've never done this before, have you?"

* * *

AN: Well, of course he hasn't, Eames. He can't risk an extractor learning his Bat secrets.

I have a theory that a person's projections are meant to represent how they interact with people. Saito, for example, is always in control of a situation, and his projections report directly to him. Fischer, on the other hand, is used to people waiting on him but not that close to anyone, so his projections take care of things without coming into contact with him. And Cobb's an emotional train wreck due to his wife, so his projection of Mal is a manifestation of that. I don't believe the Joker really interacts with anyone at all unless he's trying to mess with their heads, save for Batman, so his projections are blanks. Originally I was going to make them more monstrous and have something a bit like the Lying Figures from _Silent Hill_ (www. youtube. com/ watch?v=o7WOu_LV2Qo), but I decided to make them more Uncanny Valley than demonic.

The game with the princesses and the jewelry that the Joker refers to is "Pretty Pretty Princess," a board game that has been linked with _Inception _in my head ever since I saw this amazing fan art: taconaco. deviantart. com/ art/ PRETTY-PRETTY-INCEPTION-172235561

Fourth dimensional bridge has no deeper meaning (though I suppose if I wanted to get overly analytical I could say that bridge is a game about working with a partner and the Joker clearly doesn't understand how it works), it just struck me as something suitably absurd enough to occur in the Joker's head.


	7. Your Responsibility

AN: And yet again, an _Inception_-related dream draws me back into writing. It's getting uncanny. That, and Health Ledger's birthday is tomorrow. Sorry for my disappearance—though three weeks has nothing on four months—I spent the week before last preparing for/attending a convention and the past two weeks catching up on everything I'd neglected in that time.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Cobb glared at the pinwheels lining the walkway to the front door of Saito's Los Angeles mansion. They looked out of place amidst the carefully arranged landscaping, whirling softly in the breeze. Their blades reflected the outdoor lights, gleaming like tiny spinning knives in the darkness around them. Stupid pinwheels. Stupid everything.

He was supposed to be retired. Supposed to spend the rest of his life with hobbies that didn't involve subconscious corporate espionage or the illegal use of dreamsharing technology. And on a week night such as this, he was supposed to spend the time after he put the kids to bed reading, or having a glass of wine, or flipping through the channels looking for something good. He was _not _supposed to be leaving his children with their grandmother and driving off at night to confront billionaire CEOs. And yet here he was.

Ariadne, of course, had been the one to tell him.

She'd made a habit of calling at least once a month in the time since the inception, despite Cobb's insistence that he'd reestablish communications once he was settled in at home again. Probably she figured that he'd never reach out again if he was given the chance to slip away quietly. Maybe it wasn't such an unfounded worry, considering that in the past two years, she was the only member of the team that he'd kept in close contact, and only because of her persistence. It wasn't that he'd intended to avoid them, and he hoped they understood that. But he couldn't bring himself to reach out. Not yet. Not after putting everyone's lives at such a great risk and not even letting them know what they were headed into.

And now they were taking an even greater risk, and they hadn't as much as bothered to consult him before they took it up.

Even Ariadne, the girl who'd had to question how Cobb was holding up and if they were harming Fischer roughly every time they'd come into contact during the inception, hadn't seemed to think that going into a psychotic killer's mind was necessary information to discuss with him in detail. She'd sandwiched it between information during the phone call earlier that night, slipping the news of the job between a laundry list of other, normal activities. "I'm applying for internships over the summer, but Bruce Wayne hired the team to do a job in that Gotham asylum, so I'm not sure when we'll be pulling that off, but there's always next fall, and Saito said he'd be one of my references, so—"

Cobb had mentally checked out of the conversation at "Gotham asylum," but Ariadne changed the focus of the conversation at least two more times before he could get her attention. "Ariadne-"

"—which I think is really sweet of him, and did I tell you he invited me to go skiing in Aspen over Christmas break—"

"Ariadne."

"I mean people say that all corporate types are corrupt sociopaths, but look at Fischer and Saito, they're perfectly no—"

"_Ariadne_!"

There'd been a pause, in which Cobb had glanced down the hall, hoping the noise hadn't woken James or Phillipa, and Ariadne, he imagined, had rubbed her ear and stared at her phone in shocked indignation. "Christ, Cobb. What is it?"

"What do you mean, you're doing a job in an asylum?" It wasn't that there hadn't been other jobs since he'd returned home, or other risks. He'd worried in spite of himself, and in spite of all he knew the others could endure. But to add an asylum on top of that instinctive anxiety, especially an asylum in Gotham? Cobb had told himself long ago not to pry in jobs that didn't concern him. In most circumstances, he could respect that boundary. But this wasn't one of them. "What kind of information does Bruce Wayne need from a mental patient?"

"That's the thing, he's doesn't. It's another inception." Ariadne's voice held an almost hushed reverence, though Cobb couldn't tell if it was a respect for the danger of such a job or marvel at the thought of attempting it again.

Either way, he hadn't felt reassured. "Ariadne—"

"Relax, Cobb, it isn't even official yet. Wayne heard about the first job from Saito and he made an offer, but Arthur refuses to go along with it until Eames scopes out the Joker's mind and makes sure that it's safe, so if he says no, then it isn't worth the—"

"_Joker_?" For a moment, his thoughts had been running too fast for him to control—The _Joker_? The man who had reduced an entire city to a panic and violence almost single-handedly? The clown who had escaped from the madhouse and drove his psychiatrist over the edge in the process? No. No, the others would never agree, even Ariadne with her idealism wouldn't be so foolish, it had to be some other Joker—and Ariadne was chattering away in his ear about how he needed to trust them to make their own decisions and how they knew the risks and this could help so many people. And then Cobb had found himself hanging up the phone, dialing his mother-in-law to ask her to watch the kids for the rest of the evening, checking his email just long enough to confirm that Saito was in Los Angeles now, and then climbing into his car. The entire process had taken perhaps fifteen minutes, which, in retrospect, should have been long enough to step back and take a look at the larger picture.

It hadn't been. Neither had the length of the drive here. It was only now, walking along the path to the front of the mansion, that Cobb regained enough rationale to decide that the situation wasn't entirely Saito's fault. Probably. After all, it had been Bruce Wayne who'd decided that incepting a psychopath capable of mass murder was a good idea.

Then again, judging by the tabloid coverage the Gotham billionaire, Wayne was probably drunk when he made that decision. Or high. Or both. And since Gotham was over seventeen hundred miles away and Cobb had to take his frustrations out on someone, he wasn't too troubled by making Saito his scapegoat.

Besides, if Saito was really bothered then he could always hire someone to take the blame for him.

There was no doorbell, as Cobb had been buzzed in at the front gate. One of Saito's servants had to be waiting behind the door, about to pull it open—while another servant was rousing Saito to greet him and a third was grinding some ridiculously expensive type of coffee bean—but Cobb knocked anyway, the force of the blow stinging his hand. There were better ways to relieve stress, but none as readily available and effortless. And anyway, it was working. Cobb began to realize just how absurd it was to charge over here in the middle of the night as if Saito had been the one to request the job. Self-chastised but still frustrated, he raised his hand to knock again, nearly falling forward as the door opened to reveal a tired but politely smiling Robert Fischer.

"Hello, may I help you?"

That settled it. Saito had to die.

* * *

Eames had left the lecture up to Arthur.

The point man's personality was better suited to that sort of thing. If Arthur were a parent, his children would be the sort who viewed his lectures as a far worse punishment than grounding or anything corporal, both for the length of their duration and Arthur's skill in choosing the sharpest, most succinct words to explain why the transgression had been unacceptable and why the punishment was justly deserved. If Eames were a parent, he liked to think he'd be the type to get the message across with a sad look and an "I'm very disappointed in you." In reality, he'd probably end up as the parent who gave in without arguing, and that the children always turned to when his spouse had said no.

Either way, Arthur was better at lectures.

Wayne had already been given an earful by his butler upon their arrival at home, delivered in the manner that only elderly British mentors could achieve. It had begun with a stern "Bruce Anthony Wayne" once the man had taken in his employer's spotted appearance, and ended a quarter of an hour later, when the pair of them had returned from the parlor, the butler leaving to buy Benadryl and Wayne lingering behind, waiting in silence for either of his partners in crime to pick up where his manservant left off. Eames, having been too stunned at the risk Wayne had taken to register much of anything beyond that he'd lied—Wayne had tried to protest that he must have developed the allergy in between exposures, but his poker face wasn't up to much when he was covered in hives and still reacting to the subconscious experience—and he was never one to handle reprimands.

Arthur, by contrast, had taken up the mantle quite readily.

"You could have died." Arthur's voice was sharp enough to cut diamonds. "Did you even think about that?"

Wayne rubbed a hand over his eyes, looking as though he'd rather be dead than stuck in this situation. "Yes, I did."

"I doubt that."

With a sigh, Wayne raised his head. He looked as serious as he had when he'd proposed the job in the hotel, but this time around the hives rather ruined the effect. "The incidence of reactions is low enough that I felt justified taking the risk. I knew that I wouldn't be allowed to come along if you knew I hadn't been trained, and I had to see his mind for myself to be sure."

"Why haven't you been trained?" Eames asked, daring to venture into the conversation for the first time since Arthur had begun his tirade. It was more than abnormal to find a CEO who hadn't had their subconscious militarized these days: it was nearly unheard of. True, Wayne had disappeared from the corporate world for seven years, but surely he must have heard of the rise of extractions in that time from one source or another. At the very least, someone would have informed him when he returned to his company.

Wayne's eyes were on the floor again, nails of one hand scraping on the hives of the other. "I can't afford to allow anyone access to my mind."

Arthur scoffed, an ugly sound like a sea lion barking. It didn't suit him at all. "So instead of letting one extractor into your head, you'd risk a team of them? Or let a group of them live in your house?"

"It's not the same." Wayne loosened his collar, revealing more reddened skin. "And you're being paid too well to take that risk."

"And if you pay an extractor enough to train you, they're not about to spill all of your secrets," Eames said, cutting Arthur off before he could begin what looked to be another twenty minute diatribe on how Bruce Wayne was not a special snowflake. "Honestly, once you've been in one CEO's head, you've been in the lot of them. We only care about those things when we've been paid to care."

Wayne shook his head, a pained look on his face that might have been induced by the hives or by the conversations. Or, more likely, both. "You don't understand. I just can't take that risk."

Arthur's arms were crossed tightly, creasing the fabric of his Armani vest. It was likely to wrinkle, and that would hardly improve his mood. "So what do you expect to do to protect yourself from extraction?"

"Don't let myself be drugged." Wayne ignored Arthur's second scoff as he had the first and continued. "Look, I know it sounds stupid. But I know what I'm doing, I know how to protect and defend myself, and I've made it this far. Anyway, I only intended to go under once and it didn't kill me. I'm never doing it again, so can we just agree that it was stupid and let it go?"

It was the exact wrong thing to say, as Eames had recognized the instant the words left Wayne's lips, and as Wayne must understand now, watching as Arthur shook with quiet fury. He inhaled slowly, opened his mouth, and was about to begin the rant to end all rants, when he was interrupted by the hand of God. Or to be more accurate, his mobile ringing. Either way, Eames had been spared listening to upwards of an hour of chastisement, so he was willing to classify it as a miracle.

Arthur pulled out his mobile, barely glancing at the screen as he raised it to his ear—though he did mutter an "Oh, _that's _just what we needed" before he answered—his look of anger now restrained, though still visible. "Yes?" There was a pause, in which Arthur winced and held the mobile away from his ear, though Eames couldn't hear the voice at the other end from across the room. "Slow down, I can't make out anything you're saying."

Bruce Wayne gave Eames a confused glance, having apparently decided that between the two of them, Eames was the closest thing in the room he had to an ally. Eames could only shrug.

"No, Cobb, I _don't _have to report to you before I take on an assignment. You're the one who insisted that you'd retired."

_Oh. _Well, that explained it. Again, Eames lacked the skill in maths to calculate the odds of their former boss breaking his two year silence now to berate them for their recklessness, but whatever the percentage, Cobb couldn't have picked a worse time to reach out to them if he'd tried.

Eames felt Wayne's eyes on him and offered the most concise explanation he could. "Angry ex-boss."

"Yes, I do understand the risks…You can't disappear for two years and expect us to carry on with exactly what you would have done…Saito? You went to _Saito _before you called me? We're not on a leash, Cobb, believe it or not, we've been getting along just fine for ourselves…Well, we've had to, haven't we? You thought we were all right fending for ourselves up until now—"

Wayne wore the bewildered expression that only a man watching one of his hired con-men act like a rebellious teenager over the phone could wear. Eames gave him a sympathetic smile. "Would adding "father figure" to the mix confuse things any more?"

"Fischer what?...Oh God, he _stared_ at you? Well, you'd better get on the next plane out of the country then...Yes, yes I am mocking you…You deserve it. You can't play a man's subconscious superhero and then act surprised when he feels close to you after the fact…No, I have absolutely no sympathy."

If Wayne's eyes got any wider, his optic nerves would be dangling out of the sockets. "Our ex-boss served as Robert Fischer's white knight once," Eames explained. He thought of clarifying further, but the increasing incoherence on Wayne's face was much too entertaining for him to ruin it with understanding.

"Well, fine, I'm not about to stop you…It took you long enough." Arthur lowered the phone, looking tempted to throw it across the room. Instead, he clenched his fingers around the mobile, took a deep breath, and forced the tension from his body. "Bruce Wayne."

The billionaire's expression was now equal parts confusion and apprehension.

"I'll tell you why we can't just "let it go."" And Eames thought Arthur's voice had been hard before. "If you want to risk your own life, then feel free. But if you had died in there, Eames would have been stuck with your body. And I don't care how much those guards were paid, they're not going to ignore the corpse of Gotham's prince. If you want our help, you're going to have to make it a team effort. You can't withhold information from us and expect things to go off without a hitch." He moved his glare from their employer to the mobile in his hand, slipping it back in his pocket as he turned to leave. "Eames?"

Eames didn't quite flinch, but he'd be lying if he said he wouldn't like to flee the room. "Yes?"

"Cobb's coming here. He'll be on a flight tomorrow."

Well, that would do _wonders _for morale around here. Eames watched Arthur retreat before he turned to Bruce Wayne. "If your butler has a cell phone, I suggest you advise him to pick up some bandages while he's out."


	8. Work Placement

AN: My deepest apologies for the insane delay on this chapter. I won't bore you with the details, but for the past few months my health and personal life have been a mess, and also I picked up an internship on top of my job. The circumstances together didn't leave me in a great condition for writing. Thanks to all the readers for sticking with this story through the delay, and thank you for your reviews.

* * *

If the Joker was capable of tranquility, it seemed that quality left his body with the dreaming state. Eames could hardly call the man's subconscious peaceful—a day later and he was still at a loss for what  
to call it, though he was leaning toward a cross between "fever dream" and Goya's black period—but strange as his world was, there had been no undercurrent of tension in it. The projections were as listless as the clown's unconscious body and while the Joker hadn't exactly been captivated by his nonsensical card game, he had seemed content to keep playing. His behavior had been erratic, but the emotions beneath were calm.

The Joker that Eames had been introduced to this morning, however, the patient conscious and currently seated across the desk, exhibited the same amount of calm one might expect from a swarm of bees. He hadn't attempted anything violent—not that he'd had much chance to; so far the extent of his activities was being escorted in and sitting down—but every inch of him was so tensed, nearly shivering with pent-up energy, it was impossible to shake the feeling that he was on the verge of something awful. He seemed incapable of staying still, constantly licking his lips, shifting in his seat, winding a hand through his hair, drumming his fingers over the arm of the chair or the fabric of his pant leg. They had given him a jumpsuit in replacement of the smock, and thank heaven for that, because undoubtedly the Joker's constant movement would have resulted in far more being revealed than Eames cared to see.

He'd been in the room for less than two minutes and Eames already felt exhausted just watching him.

The Joker's eyes flickered to meet Eames's for what had to be the dozenth time in the last sixty seconds. He'd never seen brown eyes burn with such intensity, not even during Arthur's most memorable brooding glares. It wasn't an angry stare; if there was any constant in the man's ever-shifting gaze, it was curiosity. The sort of curiosity a caged animal would show a strange piece of meat thrown into its cage.

With that charming notion in mind, Eames broke the silence. "What do you prefer to be called?"

The Joker, who had already found something else to stare at—this time it was the window, with a faint but longing look—snapped his attention back to Eames, a new sort of curiosity on his face. "Say that again."

"What do you prefer to be called?"

The clown burst into the same rasping giggle from last night's dream; the sudden sound was like a gunshot in the small office. "They _imported_ my shrink?" He shook his head, grinning. "Why did they import my shrink?"

"News of a high profile case like yours travels far." That much was true; Eames couldn't imagine that any developed countries in the world hadn't heard about Gotham's terrorist. Or their vigilante, for that matter. Ruth Adams had mentioned glory-seekers contacting the asylum over the past few months; they must have come in droves. "I was intrigued."

The Joker was still smiling, but the smile had taken a decidedly worrying tone, as though the clown were in on a joke that Eames wasn't privy to. On anyone else it would have looked mischievous. The Joker looked more like a cat deciding whether or not the mouse it had cornered was juicy enough to eat. "Oh, like Harley."

"Harley?"

"Har_leen_ Quin_zel_," the Joker said, as if it were a perfectly common name. "My girlfriend? Her news must have traveled."

Possibly even farther than the Joker's, though Eames doubted the man would be pleased to hear it. Terrorists, much as the news loved to follow their exploits, were nothing new. The Joker had the novelty of his theatricality, but the public outside of Gotham would eventually grow desensitized to it. A psychiatrist falling for a terrorist and springing him from captivity, however, that was new. "I've heard of her, yes."

The Joker's smile stretched wider before his tongue distorted the shape by darting forward to caress the small scar through his lower lip. "Yeah, she was at_tract_ed to, uh, the high profile too."

The implication wasn't lost on Eames. "No, I don't think I'm anything like her."

His patient was grinning again; the asylum may be able to force the Joker to take medications, but it seemed they couldn't force him to brush his teeth. "Depends. Were _you _planning to write a book about me? 'Cause that's what she was after before I swept her off her feet."

_Does he always try to humiliate the people talking to him, or is this the result of sexual frustration building up in captivity? _ Either way, it wasn't worth the effort required to devote thought to it. If the clown wanted to get a rise out of him, he'd have to do better than that. "You never did tell me how you prefer to be addressed."

"You haven't given me your name, either. Aren't the doctors supposed to extend that courtesy first?" If Eames's lack of a reaction irritated him, there was no sign of it on his face. Then again, with his lips constantly twitching and tongue slipping in and out between words, his expression barely stayed static long enough to read. "That's what Harley did."

If he were going to be held to Quinzel's standard throughout the sessions, he doubted that these meetings would satisfy anyone. "And how, exactly, did your sessions with Harley usually go?"

"Well, uh, she came in, we talked, she'd take off my straitjacket and I'd take off her skirt." His eyes meet Eames's again, looking something close to hopeful. It didn't seem as if it was confrontation he was after, but rather attention. "Now, if _you_wanna follow in her footsteps, we'll have to make some adjustments, but—"

"I think I'll be approaching things a little differently. And it's Callahan."

"Callahan." The Joker said it slowly, mulling over the word with his tongue as though it were a flavor he was experiencing for the first time, and he wasn't sure what to make of it. "That doesn't sound par-ti-cu-lar-_ly_British."

"Sorry to disappoint."

The Joker murmured something under his breath—the only word of it Eames caught was "Jeeves"—before raising his head to regard the psychiatrist again. "So, no first name basis?"

"Do you have a first name?"

Another giggle, much shorter than the last but nonetheless grating. "Uh, duh? The."

"Your first name is The." So in addition to casual murder, destruction of property, and reckless endangerment, the man also made terrible puns. _Truly, this monster must be stopped_.

"Did you bother to actually read any of my news articles?" The Joker asked, lips turning down as far as the scars would allow them in an absurd caricature of offense. "My name was all over them."

"Most of the papers gave you their own names." That was the thing he remembered most from the infrequent papers he'd read when he wasn't working: the nicknames reporters had given the clown. As if "the Joker" weren't absurd enough, they'd had to make the whole incident sound even more  
cartoonish. "The Clown Prince of Chaos, the Harlequin of Horror—though they cut back on that one once your psychiatrist joined you—the Ace of Kna—"

"Harlequin of Horror?" the Joker asked. He appeared to taste the word again and either the texture or the flavor had thrown him for a loop. "Why would they call me _that_?"

"I'd imagine it had something to do with your terrorizing the city and the laymen's inability to distinguish between a clown and a harlequin. Though your girlfriend set them straight on the second note." As the  
Joker still looked like he'd consumed something left in the back of the fridge for too long, Eames added, "Why? Does it trouble you?"

"I wouldn't say I ter_ror_ized people." For the first time since the session had started, the clown had a completely straight face. If he'd intended that to underscore his point, he'd utterly failed; it was only Eames's professionalism that kept him from scoffing.

"Then how would you define blowing up a hospital and the assistant district attorney, trying to provoke Gotham's citizens and criminals into making each other explode, pulling your psychiatrist into a life of crime, crippling the mob, or impersonating a member of the clergy and then—"

"Art."

Eames could only stare. "I beg your pardon?"

"I'm an artist," the Joker said, his tone implying that it ought to be obvious. As if any museum or gallery exhibit would feature murder and wanton destruction. "It's just that when I make art, people, uh, tend to die."

"Have you considered taking your art in a different direction, then?" Eames wondered, belatedly, if he ought to be taking notes. Oh well. He was often forced to remember information without a notepad when he observed people to forge, and besides, it might better facilitate their conversation if his patient's every word wasn't on the record.

Now the Joker was the one staring. "Why would I do that?"

Eames had experienced many an interesting conversation in his time with the unbalanced, but this was the first time he'd ever found himself discussing the presentation of art with one. "To reach a wider audience?"

The Joker shook his head. "Restraining my creativity would alienate them."

"How so?"

"What's the one thing that ties people together regardless of race or class or political agenda?" The man's hands moved as much as he spoke, but the rest of him was still, free of the nervous energy that had pervaded his body at the start of the session. How long had he been stuck here without an outlet for the madness? Adams had said that the staff was forced, on occasion, to interact with him, but Eames doubted those interactions were long or substantial enough to improve his mood.

"Death," the Joker continued, without waiting for an answer. "Everyone dies, and everyone—barring, like, three year olds who don't know what it is when their goldfish goes belly-u_p_—everyone knows it's coming. It affects all of humanity, and everyone has their own personal reaction to it. So not only is killing people attracting more viewers, it's also making things more, um, poignant."

"So you care about how others react to your actions?" The man's sluggish projections from the night prior would certainly suggest otherwise.

The Joker sighed. "I _might_, if anyone bothered to listen to the message instead of screaming and cowering, and "Jesus no please don't kill me oh god what are you doing with those pliers.""

"So wouldn't it follow that your current method is insufficient to dispense your message?" Eames countered, wondering how safe a course of action it was as he did. _Brilliant, you've probably just given him the inspiration to do something even worse._

"Eh, they say any publicity is good publicity." The Joker stretched back in his chair, making the legs creak horribly. "Look at all that it's got me."

"A padded cell?"

The Joker giggled; continually making such sounds could not be good for his vocal cords. "Well, that, but also free healthcare, media attention for my eve_ry _action, and a doctor imported from Jolly Old England. If I had_n't _gone a killing spree, would you have still jumped at the chance to pick my brain apart?"

"If I had still received the offer and thought that I could make a difference? Yes." It wasn't a lie. Not technically.

The Joker's tongue stopped midway to his lips, retreating between his teeth as he grinned. "Oh, you're _definitely _like Harley."

"I'm not sure I follow."

"She played the altruistic card too." The Joker leaned forward, resting his elbows on Eames's desk, putting himself far too close for comfort, considering his oral hygiene and tendency to horrible maim people. "You sure it's not all the sordid _lit_tle details you're after?"

So much for building up a sense of rapport. "If you're implying—"

"Listen, Callie." The Joker leaned back, chair groaning beneath him again, spread his hands. "To be honest? I think you came here to start shit. And in general, I have no problem with starting shit. In fact, I've been known to start some shit myself. One might even say that I advocate starting shit. But if you try to start shit with _me, _well, you might just wake up one morning and find that your feet are already sitting in your slippers, and they're both on the other side of your bedroom."

It wasn't until the Joker was back in his cell that Eames realized he never had said what he preferred to be called.

* * *

He returned home to find Cobb arrived and occupying the parlor along with Arthur and Wayne, none of whom were speaking to each other, because they were all rational adults and not nursery school students and this was the mature way to handle things.

Well, to be fair, it wasn't as if Wayne knew Cobb beyond whatever Saito had told him about the inception, and Eames hardly expected that Cobb had been particularly talkative, between his not-so-distant past as an outlaw who tried to avoid dispensing personal information and the circumstances that brought about his arrival. And in Arthur's credit, he was sitting within five feet of Wayne, which for Arthur implied that he had decided he was angrier with Cobb than Wayne and as such had dropped his silent disdain for their employer.

"I was sexually harassed by a terrorist clown today," Eames announced to no one in particular. Cobb looked briefly bewildered before returning to his previous expression of mild shell shock, Wayne looked not nearly taken aback enough—this sort of occurrence must be commonplace in Gotham—and Arthur only tensed his jaw as he stood.

"You hit him last night?" Arthur asked.

"Yes?" Well, more of a slap than a hit, but the former sounded more intimidating and besides, it achieved the same effect. "Why, did you want a go?"

"No. I want you to go back in his head and do something that could actually provoke him. Alone," he added, giving Wayne a pointed look as though the billionaire hadn't already said he had no interest in returning. As if Arthur wasn't actually saying that it was Cobb who wasn't welcome, after he'd come back from retirement to chastise them and assume control of operations. "You've read the witness accounts. The clown _likes _to be hit."

"Fine. I'll go back into the mental patient's head and introduce him to all varieties of suffering. Lovely."

Arthur didn't reply, striding into the hallway. Probably sulking off to his room to listen to Edith Piaf as he brooded.

Eames, not to let his mood be darkened, sunk down onto the couch cushions beside Cobb. "And how are you enjoying your stay?"

"His butler," Cobb muttered, with a glance at Wayne but an expression as if he'd turned a corner in the manor and happened upon a ghost, "looks just like Miles."

"So I've heard."

Cobb shook his head, one hand in his pocket and almost certainly on his totem. "There is something wrong with this city."

Eames didn't bother to say that he'd been told that one too.

* * *

AN: Francisco Goya was a Spanish artist who is particularly well known for his "black period," in which he took to painting the walls of his home black and painting on top of them. The most well-known work from that period is probably _Saturn Devouring His Son: _ en. wikipedia. org / wiki/ Saturn_Devouring_His_Son

"Impersonating a member of the clergy" was one of Captain Jack Sparrow's crimes, as read aloud before his would-be execution in _The Curse of the Black Pearl. _I've always loved that particular grievance because it sounds so random. And after the release of the fourth film and Angelica, who was once in a convent, I can't help but wonder if that doesn't have something to do with it.


	9. Agitation

AN: It's been over a year since I updated any fan fics, or communicated with most anyone I met in the Bat fandom community, and I apologize. I had a very trying year, between graduating college, having a case of bronchitis last for over six months, being diagnosed with dysthymic disorder and Asperger's syndrome, dealing with an emotionally abusive roommate, and finding a job, among other things, but I am trying to work through all the issues I've dealt with and get back to my passion for writing. I am sincerely sorry for any reviews I have not responded to or communications I have ignored over the past year. Thank you to everyone who has continued to read and enjoy my work in that time, and thank you to everyone who has reviewed or contacted me.

* * *

The benefit to beating someone senseless in a dream was that it took considerably less effort than the same act would in reality.

Which wasn't to say that Eames took any enjoyment from reducing the clown to a broken, giggling heap on the floor of Arkham's rec room. Terrorist or not, invading an unguarded mind for the purpose of stirring up agitation and pain was an appalling abuse of dream sharing. Eames was a forger, not a sadist. His morality may not be defined in the most black and white of terms, and a life of corporate espionage didn't dampen his ability to sleep at night, but his willing involvement in extraction hardly led to an absolution of brutal and needless beatings.

So he found himself grudgingly grateful, as the Joker stared up at him, black-rimmed eyes still sparkling with mirth as the clown cradled his broken ribs, that it had only taken a few well-placed blows to bring his victim to this state.

Eames hadn't intended to beat the man when he brought him into the dream asylum for the second time. It had always been a possibility—Arthur had demanded to know what would cause the madman's mind to fight back, after all—but most any other subconscious could be provoked into a confrontation long before a fist was thrown. Blatantly alter enough elements of the dreamscape and the projections were bound to grow hostile.

The clown's subconscious, however, proved to be as contrary as his waking self.

The first attempt—knocking a few books from the rec room's shelf and stopping them before they fell to the floor, hanging in limbo over the tiles—hadn't warranted as much as a glance from the projections. Granted, Eames wasn't sure if the shambling monstrosities could see, given their lack of eyes, but certainly they should have felt his intrusion. The Joker hadn't noticed either, but that was expected. It was rarely the mark who sensed a strangeness in the dream, particularly if that mark was untrained. One's consciousness expected a dream to be nonsensical, and lacked the depth of insight necessary to recognize another's manipulation.

After the books failed, Eames had dropped all pretense of subtlety, dreamt a little bigger, and altered the dimensions of the room. The walls widened, floor supports creaking as they stretched to match. The cinder blocks making up the walls had lengthened, growing taller and taller until they split like cells in mitosis, forming new rows as the room grew higher. The glass in the window frames distorted as it expanded, rippling like liquid before snapping back into one smooth, solid sheet as the growth stopped. The floor of the asylum was still shaking minutely as it had in the last dream, the clown's hypersensitive mind feeling every vibration of the air vent in his cell as he slept, and that sensation in tandem with the room's metamorphosis gave Eames the unsettling sense of watching an earthquake.

The rec room had grown high as a tower once he gave up on distorting it, and vast as a warehouse. The projections hadn't moved beyond a few continuing the aimless wandering they had been at before he'd begun. There was no undercurrent of tension or urgency to any of them, no equivalents of eyeless glares cast his way. Even the bizarre illumination emanating from beneath their sternums didn't seem to change color or intensity in response. He'd dealt with projections of the delusional or even catatonic in the past, but even those manifestations would have responded to blatant disturbance by now.

Eames had once been told that the projections of marks with high fevers were incredibly sluggish, too overwhelmed by illness's taxation on the body to respond to another invasion. It was the only point of comparison he had for the clown's mind. He'd broken just about every rule of extraction in less than five minutes, and the only sign of any response on the Joker's part was that it had grown slightly cloudy outside. And if the biggest threat he was going to face was a not-so-sunny afternoon, then Eames was ready to perform inception here and now, alone.

Instead, he'd made a last ditch effort to provoke the man's subconscious before he went to face the clown himself, and reversed the movement of the sun.

The sky darkened as the sun sped backward, hours reversing in the course of seconds. It had been pouring rain when he stopped, not quite a storm but threatening to escalate. There were no dangerous winds, no hail pounding against the windows. No reaction from the projections, when Eames turned his gaze back inside, and nothing from the Joker, laying on a couch that had been beside the window before the room grew and that was now a dozen yards away, reading a book.

Eames had closed the space between them and grabbed the clown's hair, forcing his head back until their eyes met. The words in the book the Joker held were illegible, the letters shifting around between the fibers of the paper like insects swarming under a cloth. There was a pause in which Eames waited for retaliation, either from the Joker or his projections. Neither came. He hadn't really expected projections unbothered by violations of the laws of physics to come running when he resorted to hair pulling. The clown himself looked as though he were trying to work out whether he should be confused or entertained. "If you're _that _curious about, um, my styling products," he said, licking red lips that were much more smoothly painted than his cosmetics in the real world, "you can just ask, you know."

His response to being dragged off the sofa by his hair had been to giggle. His projections, having apparently inherited his lack of self-preservation, remained motionless. Outside, the rain continued.

"I don't thin_k_," said the Joker, as Eames had hauled him to his feet, "that the ACLU's gonna like your brand of therapy."

It had only occurred to Eames as his fist was connecting to the clown's jaw that it would have been wise to disguise his appearance before he began provoking the man. If the Joker was one to remember his dreams, then he'd remember that his subconscious had assigned his newly appointed psychiatrist as the man who beat him senseless for no discernible reason. And, sexual deviance the clown had demonstrated in their first session aside, that sort of association couldn't be good for establishing doctor-patient rapport.

Another blow, and the Joker was on the floor, cackling as Eames's foot connected with his torso. He could feel the clown's ribs snap like pencils through the sole of his shoe, and it turned his stomach. There were flashes of darkness at the windows, but when Eames raised his head, there was nothing to meet his gaze but the storm clouds.

The Joker had raised himself to his knees, one hand on the floor to support himself as the other shielded his ribs, blood gushing from his nose. His smile was stained red, wide, but he made no effort to get up, and his subconscious failed to come to his aid. "Nice. What other flavors have you got?"

By way of response, Eames reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol.

For the first time since his hair had been grabbed, the Joker's eyes left his attacker's, staring up at the barrel of the gun as though Christmas had come early. Lightning flashed outside, illuminating the clown's face in a way the fluorescent bulbs far overhead couldn't, making him look absolutely glowing with anticipation. "_Oh_," he breathed, appreciative, his voice reverberating with the thunder that shook the asylum. "You've just gone and done the dumbest thing in your whole life."

There was another flash of darkness at the window, and this time, when Eames raised his head, the glass shattered.

The foundations of the building rattled as the thing that crashed through the window landed, knocking Eames to the ground. The gun slipped from his hand, sliding just out of reach on the floor.

An impossibly black boot slammed down on the pistol, grinding the metal to shards under its heel.

Eames felt fragments of the gun slice his skin as he shuffled back, struggling to upright himself as he took in the creature before him.

"Impossibly black" had been the only words his mind could think of to describe it, but even that was short of the mark. It wasn't black, it was darkness incarnate. It was as though any light that touched the being was simply absorbed into it, as though it was a shadow given three dimensional, humanoid form. But "shadow" couldn't convey the sense of solidity the thing exuded. The cloak wrapped around its shoulders—the folds in the fabric were like staring into a black hole—moved like a shadow, enveloping its bearer in a dark, filmy layer, but the rest of it...it might as well have been carved from pure black, smooth rock. There were etchings over its body as though it were encased in armor, but Eames was sure if he were to cut away the layers there would be no flesh beneath, no blood, just pure, impenetrable darkness. It was a void made flesh, nothing upon nothing layered into being.

It had no facial features, no hair, only more smooth, solid darkness. And a set of long, smooth, pointed ears on the sides of its head.

The Batman.

The Joker's laughter had changed. Before it had been mocking, dismissive, reflecting that, while he may be enjoying himself, Eames had better think again if he imagined his beating actually mattered. Now there was no undercurrent through it, nothing but genuine happiness. He was watching his dream come true, and if that happened at Eames's expense, all the better.

There was no time to move, no time to dream up a way to defend himself. The Batman's hands were around his throat, lifting him into the air, wrapping tighter and tighter around his neck until Eames expected to feel the sides of his esophagus grinding against each other. There were blades on the Batman's arms, so thin and sharp that they looked as if they could cut through any light that tried to settle on them, and Eames could feel his lungs burning in his chest, begging for oxygen, his hands clawing at the Batman's grip, when the hands at his throat grew tighter than ever, cracking his larynx, and he felt his spine snap.

* * *

"And you're sure it was the gun that he reacted to?"

Even now, hours and a few stiff drinks later, Eames could feel the vice-like grip of the projection's hands around his throat. "For God's sake, Arthur, if it was the threat to the clown himself and not the gun, don't you think he'd have shown back up after everything else I put him through?"

It had taken a moment, lying on the floor of the Joker's cell, nearly hyperventilating in his attempts to fill his lungs with the air he'd so desperately needed before the Batman broke his neck and woke him up, for Eames to gather the resolve to put himself back under. It wasn't that he was frightened of a repeat encounter—it was only a dream, after all—but that his body, heart hammering and hands shaking, did not want to go through the experience of strangulation again without a bit of a break. It was one thing to be fatally shot or to fall to one's death in a dream. Both of those were quick and relatively painless, and faster sensations for the body to let go of once it woke.

But once his breathing had steadied, he went back under. The Joker's expression upon seeing the gun had burned itself into his mind as clearly as the Batman projection's appearance. The beating hadn't made him look that way. When he was just being punched, he wasn't anticipating the Batman's arrival. The only question was if the reaction had been to the gun itself or to the threat of deadly force.

And so he'd applied deadly force upon starting another dream, in any other way he could think of. Beating, stabbing, drowning, scalding, burning, freezing. He'd stopped just short of killing the man after each, dreaming the clown back to full health and trying again. It was ghastly, horrific, and even now he couldn't rid his mind of the image of the Joker huddling as far away from his assailant as he could drag himself, his hands frozen solid and shattering from his attempts to crawl. The only consolation was that he'd had the presence of mind to disguise himself the second time around, so hopefully there would be no subconscious fear once they met again in the waking world. Hopefully, as he'd been fully healed after each assault and they'd played a game of fourth dimensional bridge before Eames woke up, there would be no subconscious scars at all.

But traumatizing or not, none of the tortures had brought the Batman back. Upon his arrival back at the manor, Wayne had confirmed that, before the day the Joker was arrested, the day of the murders of Harvey Dent and five others, Batman had never been known to use guns. Which lead to the current situation of Wayne, Cobb, Arthur, and himself sitting on the billionaire's sofas with the point man analyzing the encounter to the last detail.

"None of the other attacks were as sudden, though, were they?"

"I'd say walking up to him and stabbing him in the throat was rather abrupt."

"At this point, I think it's safe to say he was reacting to the gun," Cobb said, and added, before Arthur could argue for the sake of proving that Cobb was no longer in charge of the team, "The question is, what does that mean for the inception? Beyond avoiding guns, obviously."

"We need a contingency for if the Batman comes back." Eames realized that the brandy in his glass had evaporated at some point during the conversation and frowned. "He's unnaturally fast and powerful, and I doubt he can be shot. But it also takes a very specific set of circumstances to bring him out."

"And his other projections don't react at all?" Wayne asked.

Eames nodded.

"Then it shouldn't be too hard to move him around in a dream, forcibly or otherwise."

Arthur looked as though his own glass was full of vinegar. "Fine. Then we can contact Ariadne and Yusuf and put together a plan. But if we encounter _anything _like the Bat projection again without a gun, then I'm reserving the right to pull the plug on the operation."

Wayne, who mostly looked relieved to have gotten through a conversation with the man that didn't end in a lecture or with Cobb and Arthur at each other's throats, agreed.

* * *

AN: After watching _Inception _for the first time, I did a lot of thinking about the uses and abuses of dream sharing technology, and realized that someone with grudge could commit a lot of torture with the aid of a Pasiv, which in part inspired the "agitate the Joker" ideas in this chapter.

"You just gone and done the dumbest thing in your whole life" is a line from _Sin City_, and one that I just had to reference here because it remains my favorite response to having a gun pulled on oneself ever.

…I just realized that I may have made the Joker's Batman projection into his own personal Iron Giant.

Severe frostbite has been a phobia of mine ever since I watched an extremely disturbing sequence from _The Men Behind the Sun_, a Chinese film about the atrocities of the Japanese Unit 731 during WWII. If you've seen the movie, you know the scene. If you haven't, save your mind the scarring.


End file.
